New method makes nuclear waste much safer to store and transport
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Scientists modified a technology created for solar energy to remove americium, one of the most complex and difficult-to-eliminate elements in nuclear waste pools, solving a decades-old problem in storing nuclear waste.
According to a study published in the journal Science, the research not only opens the door to scaling up one of the most efficient energy sources on the planet, but also adds a major element of completing the nuclear fuel cycle; a development, along with renewable energy, that could help power the world’s energy needs safely for the future.
“In order to solve the nuclear waste problem, you have to solve the americium problem,” study author Tom Meyer, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, said in a press release.
A long-term goal for nuclear energy
While Americium doesn’t have the same popularity as a plutonium and uranium, scientists have been attempting to take it out of nuclear waste for decades. Many research groups initially had success, only to be met with complications later on, making the solution unfeasible.
In the new study, researchers said they discovered a way to expunge the radioactive element without experiencing downstream difficulties that obstructed progress.
The technology developed in the new study is related to techniques used to in solar power to pull electrons from water molecules. In the americium project, researchers modified the technology to pull electrons from americium, which requires twice the maximum amount of energy input as splitting water. By eliminating three electrons, the team made americium act like plutonium and uranium, which is easy to remove with existing technology.
Nuclear fuel is primarily packaged as small solid pellets packed into long, thin rods. To reprocess them, the spent fuel is first dissolved in acid and the plutonium and uranium is then seperated. Americium can now be divided with plutonium and uranium or taken out in a second step.
“With a scaled up solution, not only will we no longer have to think about the dangers of storing radioactive waste long-term, but we will have a viable solution to close the nuclear fuel cycle and contribute to solving the world’s energy needs,” said co-author Chris Dares, a researcher at UNC. “That’s exciting.”
Scans of King Tutankhamun’s tomb have ‘90% chance’ of revealing secret rooms
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Scans of King Tutankhamun’s tomb have revealed the existence of two previously undiscovered chambers, one of which may contain the remains of Queen Nefertiti, Egypt’s antiquities minister Mamduh al-Damati announced during a press conference on Thursday .
According to AFPand Associated Press reports, Mamdouh el-Damaty said that the scans showed that there was a “90 percent” chance of secret chambers hidden behind the north and western walls of the tomb, and that those rooms contain either metallic or organic materials.
The minister said that additional scans would be completed later on this month to determine the exact dimensions of these chambers, but declined to speculate if there may be hidden treasures or mummies hidden behind the secret walls in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
UK archaeologist Nicholas Reeves previously claimed his research indicated Queen Nefertiti’s tomb may be located in a secret chamber near Tutankhamun’s tomb, which is located at the Valley of Kings in Luxor in southern Egypt. The new scans from radar expert Hirokatsu Watanabu appears to lend credence to Reeves’ hypothesis, according to the wire service reports.
Find may be ‘the discovery of the century,’ experts say
During a television broadcast last year, Reeves said that his analysis of high-resolution images uncovered straight lines in the tomb that were previously hidden by the color and texture of the stones. Those lines likely indicated the presence of a secret, sealed chamber, he claimed. During Thursday’s news conference, el-Damaty showed radar scans containing anomalies in the walls of the tomb, indicating possible hidden doors covered up and painted over with hieroglyphics.
Reeves speculated that the sudden and unexpected death of Tutankhamun likely forced priests to reopen Nefertiti’s tomb about a decade after her death, as the boy king’s own mausoleum had not yet been completed. In this case, he would have been buried in a hurry in a chamber that was not originally meant for him. Alternatively, the organic matter in the hidden chambers – if, indeed, it is a mummy, could be Kiya, who like Nefertiti was a wife of Akhenaten, the AFP added.
The next radar test is scheduled to take place on March 31, and will involve an “improved” radar which “measure for the dimensions… and the thickness of the walls,” el-Damaty noted during the press event. The results of that test will be announced in Luxor on April 1. He added that the find is “a very big discovery” for Egyptian historians – possibly “the discovery of the century.”
Milky Way’s black hole may be source of high-energy cosmic rays
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Using telescopes at the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) observatory in Namibia, an international team of researchers have discovered that the highest-energy cosmic rays found in the Milky Way are not the result of supernova explosions, as previously believed.
Rather, as reported in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature, the HESS Collaboration team has found a different, somewhat unexpected new source of the rays: the supermassive black hole located at the center of the galaxy, which reportedly accelerates cosmic radiation to an energy 100 times thought possible at Earth’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.
While most cosmic rays are produced by supernova, these explosions cannot explain the highest energy cosmic rays – those with energy levels measured in peta-electronvolts (PeV), Scienceand Cosmosexplained. The cosmic rays were found as they collided and interacted with surrounding gases to produce gamma rays, which astronomers can use to trace their source.
Scientists have known about these high-energy particle waves, which bombard our planet from space, for more than a century. However, their origins have long been the topic of debate. With their recent observations from the HESS telescope array, the authors of the new study found that the distribution of gamma rays coming from the heart of the galaxy matches up with what would be expected if a process occurring near the black hole was emitting PeV cosmic rays.
Pinpointing the exact source of the acceleration will have to wait
“It really demonstrates that there is a central source” of cosmic rays, Werner Hofmann from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, told Science. Unfortunately, he added that the research provides “very few clues about what the actual accelerator is.” But he and his colleagues will continue monitoring the galactic center to see if they can figure it out.
One possibility presented in the paper is that there may be a region around the black hole where dust and gas are being pulled in by its gravity, and during this process, the electric and magnetic fields of the superheated material is somehow causing protons to accelerate to high energies. An effort to track changes in luminosity and gamma ray distribution in the upcoming weeks, months and even years ahead could confirm or disprove this possibility, the researchers said.
“The supermassive black hole located at the center of the Galaxy, called Sgr A, is the most plausible source of the PeV protons,” Felix Aharonian, also of the Max Planck Institute, said in a statement. “Several possible acceleration regions can be considered, either in the immediate vicinity of the black hole, or further away, where a fraction of the material falling into the black hole is ejected back into the environment, thereby initiating the acceleration of particles.”
The authors explained that the HESS readings of the gamma-ray emissions infer the spectrum of protons accelerated by the central black hole and reveal that it is likely the cause of those rays reaching PeV energy levels. The protons alone are unable to account for all of the cosmic rays detected, but if the black hole had been more active in the past than it is now, it may be responsible for most of the rays being observed from the Earth today, they added.
A definitive answer will have to wait until the construction of a new detector, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), is detected, Hoffman told Science. The CTA will have more than 100 mirrors distributed across multiple sites in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and will be capable of producing higher-resolution images than it currently possible, he said.
Bone analysis gives insight into life and legend of King Erik IX
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Swedish king and saint Erik Jedvardsson may have met a bloody end more than 850 years ago, but his remains—held in reliquaries since 1257—have plenty of stories left to tell modern scientists.
The history of King Erik IXis somewhat murky, as fact and fiction bonded together over the years, but the legends speak of a man chosen to be king, who ruled fairly and acted as a devoted Christian. During his life, he codified the laws of his kingdom and led the First Swedish Crusade into Finland in order to spread the Christian faith, among many other things.
But it all came to an abrupt end in 1160, when, as Erik was leaving church after celebrating mass, he entered a massive battle with enemies looking to gain his throne. He was swarmed and fell to the ground, where he was taunted and eventually beheaded. According to legend, a fountain began to spring from where his head came to rest, and eventually the Roman Catholic Church gave him his own yearly feast day on May 18th.
A bit shy of 100 years later, his remains and burial crown were placed in a reliquary, and his body has been preserved that way ever since. Then, in 1946, researchers pulled out his bones to analyze them—but technology has drastically advanced since then. So in 2014, his reliquary was opened again, allowing researchers of different specialties to study his remains. And now, their results have finally been made public.
Bone analysis bares fruit
“The interdisciplinary research collaboration on the analysis of the skeletal remains of Saint Erik provides extensive information about his health condition (orthopaedists and radiologists), genealogy (aDNA analysis), diet (isotope analysis), and his death (forensic medicine),” said project leader Sabine Sten, professor of osteoarchaeology at Uppsala University, in a university statement.
Saint Erik’s reliquary held 23 bones which appear to come from the same person, plus one shinbone from someone else. For the 23 bones, radiocarbon dating is consistent with Saint Erik’s death in 1160. Meanwhile, osteological analysis of the bones indicate they belonged to a man aged 35-40 years who was about 5’7” (171 cm) tall.
The researchers also used the bones to gauge the health of the king. Computer tomography found no discernable medical conditions, and other tests revealed he also didn’t suffer from osteoporosis. In fact, he had bones that was 25 percent denser than today’s average young adult, and all in all it appears the King Erik was quite healthy, being well-nourished and physically active in his lifetime.
In fact, isotope analysis of his bones revealed he ate a lot of freshwater fish—an indication that he obeyed the Roman Church’s rules concerning fasts (periods without meat).
Other analyses are still underway, though. For example, the researchers have been able to draw DNA information from the remains, but this work will still take another year to complete. Furthermore, a separate isotope analysis has drawn the very preliminary result that Erik actually lived farther south in the last year of his life than the stories tell.
Low-tech solutions bring forth information
Perhaps the most interesting information, though, comes by way of simpler techniques—visual searches of the bones.
On the cranium, there are one or two dents representing healed head wounds—which the researchers believe can be explained by King Erik’s leading of the First Swedish Crusade. Moreover, there are nine cuts on the rest of the bones—seven on the legs alone—which were inflicted close to the time of death.
Judging from these nine wounds, researchers believe King Erik’s last battle went like this: After being swarmed, he was knocked onto his stomach on the ground. His enemies taunted him, cutting exposed parts of his body—his chest was probably protected by a hauberk (a shirt of chain mail), meaning they could only leave cuts on the backs of his legs.
The hauberk protected the king’s neck, and so it was finally removed while his assailants taunted him. And then, he was beheaded—as confirmed by a cut in a neck vertebra.
All in all, the evidence gathered does not contradict the legends told about King Erik IX—but there is still more work still being done. The current results, though, are to be published in the scientific journal Fornvännen.
After baffling paleontologists for more than 55 years, a fossil enigma known as the Tully Monster has finally been definitively identified in a new report published in the journal Nature.
A relative of the modern-day lamprey, the Tully Monster is an oddly constructed sea creature with teeth at the end of a slender, trunk-like extension of its head and eyes that sit on both sides of a long, stiff bar.
In the study, paleontologists has established the 300-million-year-old animal, which grew just a foot long, was a vertebrate, with gills and a stiff notochord, which supported its body– characteristics that weren’t previously known.
“I was first intrigued by the mystery of the Tully Monster. With all of the exceptional fossils, we had a very clear picture of what it looked like, but no clear picture of what it was,” study author Victoria McCoy, a graduate researcher at Yale University, said in a press release.
Uncovering the mystery of the Tully Monster
Discovered in 1958 and described in 1966, the Tully Monster has never been identified down to the phylum level until this latest research effort.
The species is named after amateur fossil hunter Francis Tully, the man who discovered the first specimen. Tully found the fossil in the coal-mining pits of northeastern Illinois, and thousands of other specimens were later discovered in the same location.
Since its discovery, the Tully Monster has achieved cult celebrity status in Illinois and it became the official state fossil in 1989.
“Basically, nobody knew what it was,” said study author Derek Briggs, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. “The fossils are not easy to interpret, and they vary quite a bit. Some people thought it might be this bizarre, swimming mollusk. We decided to throw every possible analytical technique at it.”
To precisely describe the Tully Monster, the study team analyzed more than 2,000 specimens at the Field Museum in Chicago. Using synchrotron elemental mapping and other state-of-the-art tools, the researchers were able to identify gills and a notochord, neither of which had been identified in the previously.
“It’s so different from its modern relatives that we don’t know much about how it lived,” McCoy said. “It has big eyes and lots of teeth, so it was probably a predator.”
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the Tully Monster, including when it first appeared and when it went extinct.
“We only have this little window,” Briggs said.
—– Image credit: Yale University
Researchers discover first-ever pregnant T. rex specimen
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A seemingly innocent-looking femur belonging to a long-dead Tyrannosaurus rex revealed that the dinosaur was pregnant at the time of its death – a rare confirmation of the creature’s sex that could also explain when and how modern birds evolved to lay eggs.
According to the Washington Post, Schweitzer and her colleagues found a type of tissue in the femur known as medullary bone, which is only present in female birds that are currently carrying eggs or which have recently finished laying them. Since medullary bone needs to be laid down and mobilized quickly for the birds to shell their eggs, it is chemically distinct from other bone types, the researchers explained.
Like modern birds, theropod dinosaurs such as the T. rex also reproduced by laying eggs, and paleontologists have long hypothesized that female members of this dinosaur group would also have possessed medullary bone. In 2005, Schweitzer led a team that believed it found this bone type in the fossilized femur, and the new study appears to confirm that earlier discovery.
Research could lead to discovery of sex-specific dinosaur traits
“All the evidence we had at the time pointed to this tissue being medullary bone, but there are some bone diseases that occur in birds, like osteopetrosis, that can mimic the appearance of medullary bone under the microscope,” Schweitzer explained. “So to be sure we needed to do chemical analysis of the tissue.”
Medullary bone contains a substance known as keratan sulfate, which is not present in any other type of bone. Researchers previously believed that none of the chemistry of a fossilized dinosaur bone would have survived a period of several million years, but tests were able to detect keratan sulfate in the bone and confirm that the T. rex tissue was indeed medullary bone.
“This analysis allows us to determine the gender of this fossil, and gives us a window into the evolution of egg laying in modern birds,” Schweitzer said. However, due to the very nature of medullary bone, she cautions that finding more examples of it in the fossil record may be hard, especially since, as the Washington Post pointed out, the bones need to be broken in order for these tests to be conducted (the femur used in this study was already broken, they noted).
Nonetheless, as co-author and NC State paleontologist Lindsay Zanno explained, the research could provide valuable insight into dinosaurs. “It’s a dirty secret, but we know next to nothing about sex-linked traits in extinct dinosaurs,” Zanno said. “Dinosaurs weren’t shy about sexual signaling, all those bells and whistles, horns, crests, and frills, and yet we just haven’t had a reliable way to tell males from females. Just being able to identify a dinosaur definitively as a female opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Now that we can show pregnant dinosaurs have a chemical fingerprint, we need a concerted effort to find more.”
Black hole V404 Cygni erupts with the power of 1,000 suns, astronomers find
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
During a two week long outburst last summer, a black hole located approximately 7,800 light years from Earth gave off a series of violent red flashes as it consumed material stripped from an orbiting companion star, researchers from the University of Southampton have discovered.
The black hole in question, V404 Cygni, underwent one of the brightest black hole outbursts in recent years last June, and according to Dr. Poshak Gandhi, associate professor and STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow in the university’s Astronomy Group, and his colleagues reported in the latest edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
V404 Cygni, the first definitive black hole to be confirmed in the Milky Way, can appear to be extremely bright when devouring material, the study authors explained. During its two week stretch of activity in June 2015, it emitted red flashes that lasted a fraction of a second each as it ejected material that it was unable to swallow, they added.
Each of the flashes had brightness equal to the power output of nearly 1,000 suns, and some were less than 1/40th of a second in length, or nearly ten times faster than it normally takes a human to blink his or her eyes. The astronomers believe that the flashes’ red color was linked to the rapidly moving jets of matter ejected from close to the black hole.
The red flash in question (Credit: University of Southampton)
Outburst was the brightest event of its kind in many years
The observations, which were captured using the ULTRACAM fast imaging camera instrument equipped to the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands, may improve our knowledge of how these jets form and other extreme characteristics of black holes, Dr. Gandhi said.
“The very high speed tells us that the region where this red light is being emitted must be very compact,” he explained. “Piecing together clues about the color, speed, and the power of these flashes, we conclude that this light is being emitted from the base of the black hole jet. The origin of these jets is still unknown, although strong magnetic fields are suspected to play a role.”
“Furthermore,” Dr. Ghandi added, “these red flashes were found to be strongest at the peak of the black hole’s feeding frenzy. We speculate that when the black hole was being rapidly force-fed by its companion orbiting star, it reacted violently by spewing out some of the material as a fast-moving jet. The duration of these flashing episodes could be related to the switching on and off of the jet, seen for the first time in detail.”
The unpredictable nature of black hole outbursts presents a challenge for astronomers, who must quickly respond when such an event begins if they hope to study it. As an example, V404 Cygni had not erupted since 1989 when it did so last June, and the researchers were fortunate enough to monitor what turned out to be one of the brightest black hole outbursts in several years.
“The 2015 event has greatly motivated astronomers to coordinate worldwide efforts to observe future outbursts,” said Dr. Gandhi. “Their short durations, and strong emissions across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, require close communication, sharing of data, and collaborative efforts amongst astronomers. These observations can be a real challenge, especially when attempting simultaneous observations from ground-based telescopes and space satellites.”
The Protestant Reformation turned 16th-century Europe on its head as religious power shifted and splintered across the continent in one fell swoop—or at least, many people tend to think of it that way. But new evidence found hidden inside a copy of the first Bible printed in England shows that this cultural revolution took longer than we thought.
Finding hidden notes
The Bible in question is one of seven surviving copies left, all of which were published by Henry VIII’s printer, Thomas Bethelet in July of 1535. The preface of the Bible, which can be found in Lambeth Palace Library, was written by King Henry himself—but the rest was deceptively normal.
“At first glance it appears to be a clean copy, with little to no marginal annotations and signs of reading,” wrote the researcher who made the discovery, Dr. Eyal Poleg of Queen Mary University of London, in a blog post for the library.
“A more careful look reveals a hidden layer. At empty spaces at the end of prologues and sections, or at blank margins, a very thick paper was carefully pasted. This was done so professionally that previous librarians have placed the library stamp and wrote the shelf mark on this pasted paper.”
Naturally, Dr. Poleg wondered why paper had been pasted over blank sections of the Bible, and so with the library’s permission, he began a non-obtrusive experiment.
“Using long exposures and a light-sheet, Steph Eeles, the Library’s resourceful photographer, was able to reveal some of the happening underneath,” wrote Poleg. “It revealed a mass of marginal annotations. However, as the images merged texts from both sides of the paper, they were virtually indecipherable.”
This is the scanned page with both sides of annotations visible (Credit Lambeth Palace Library)
And so Dr. Poleg recruited Dr. Graham Davis, who specializes in 3D X-ray imaging at Queen Mary’s School of Dentistry. Dr. Davis wrote a new piece of software that took the merged photographs and subtracted one layer of annotations from the other, producing clear pictures of one side of each page.
Some of the annotations after the images were processed (Credit: Lambeth Palace Library)
Hidden notes
As it turns out, the annotations come from the Great Bible of Thomas Cromwell—the first authorized version of the Bible in English, often seen as the epitome of the English Reformation. Up until the point in which it was printed, Latin has been the language of all things related to the Church; services by law were conducted in Latin, and English Bibles had been strictly forbidden in England. However, the majority of those attending church and reading the Bible could not speak Latin, thus requiring the Church and priests to act as mediators.
These English annotations, meanwhile, were written between the year the Great Bible was printed, 1539, and 1549—the most tumultuous years of King Henry’s reign, including moving away from the Church of Rome, suppression of the monasteries, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the executions of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More. Their discovery indicates that the Reformation was more of a gradual shift in lieu of a sudden cultural flip.
“Until recently, it was widely assumed that the Reformation caused a complete break, a Rubicon moment when people stopped being Catholics and accepted Protestantism, rejected saints, and replaced Latin with English,” said Poleg in a Queen Mary statement. “This Bible is a unique witness to a time when the conservative Latin and the reformist English were used together, showing that the Reformation was a slow, complex, and gradual process.”
The annotations were obscured in 1600, and they remained hidden until 2015. Interestingly, Dr. Poleg was able to trace the path of the book during the intervening years, when Latin Bibles had more or less ceased to be used entirely. For example, on the back page, he discovered a handwritten communication between two men: a William Cheffyn of Calais, and a James Elys Cutpurse (with his last name indicating his profession—pickpocket) of London.
Cutpurse had written an agreement with Cheffyn, in which he had promised to pay him 20 shillings or else go to a notorious prison known as Southwark. Poleg discovered in archival research that Cutpurse was later hanged, in July of 1552.
“Beyond Mr Cutpurse’s illustrious occupation, the fact that we know when he died is significant. It allows us to date and trace the journey of the book with remarkable accuracy – the transaction obviously couldn’t have taken place after his death,” said Poleg.
“The book is a unique witness to the course of Henry’s Reformation,” he added. “Printed in 1535 by the King’s printer and with Henry’s preface, within a few short years the situation had shifted dramatically. The Latin Bible was altered to accommodate reformist English, and the book became a testimony to the greyscale between English and Latin in that murky period between 1539 and 1549.
“Just three years later things were more certain. Monastic libraries were dissolved, and Latin liturgy was irrelevant. Our Bible found its way to lay hands, completing a remarkably swift descent in prominence from Royal text to recorder of thievery.”
Hiker discovers one-of-a-kind ancient Roman gold coin in Israel
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A simple walk through the countryside led to the discovery of a lifetime for one Israeli woman, who found a 2,000-year-old gold Roman coin bearing the image of Emperor Augustus during a hike in Galilee, the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced in a statement.
According to Discovery.com and New York Daily News reports, the coin is just the second of its kind known to exist, and was minted by Roman Emperor Trajan in 107 AD as part of a series of nostalgic coins paying tribute to the rules that preceded him. It was discovered by Laurie Rimon, who spotted it shining in the grass while hiking through eastern Galilee recently.
Rimon and her tour guide, Irit Zuk-Kovacsi contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, and two hours later they were met by a representative who collected the artifact – which Rimon admitted was difficult to part with. “After all,” she told the IAA, “it is not every day one discovers such an amazing object, but I hope I will see it displayed in a museum in the near future.”
Dr. Danny Syon, a senior numismatist at the agency, said that the coin “is rare on a global level” and Dr. Donald T. Ariel, head curator of the IAA’s coin department, added that the artifact “may reflect the presence of the Roman army in the region some 2,000 years ago” but added that it is “difficult to determine that on the basis of a single coin.”
Only the third gold coin from Trajan’s reign ever discovered
What makes the gold coin, which ABC News said is now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, so special is that most coins from Emperor Trajan’s era tend to be made from silver or bronze. Only two other gold coins from this emperor have been registered in the State Treasures to date, noted Discovery.com, and the details on each of them are different from this newfound coin.
Dr. Ariel believes that the artifact could be linked to Roman military presence in the area linked to efforts to subdue supporters of the Bar Kochba Revolt from 132 to 136 AD. Roman soldiers of this era were reportedly paid three gold coins (the equivalent of 75 silver coins) each payday, and due to the high value of these gold coins, local merchants could not provide change for them and thus would not accept them in exchange for goods.
Rimon told the New York Daily News that she initially thought the object might be a toy, while her hiking companions knew that she had discovered something special, telling her that she may have just become a millionaire. However, she decided to surrender the coin to the IAA, who will present her with a certificate of appreciation for good citizenship in the near future.
“Laurie demonstrated exemplary civic behavior by handing this important coin over to the Antiquities Authority,” Nir Distelfeld, an inspector with the IAA Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery, said, noting that it is a hard thing to part with such an object, “especially when it comes to a spectacular gold coin.” Distelfeld called it a “remarkable and surprising discovery” and that “thanks to Laurie, the public will be able to enjoy this rare find.”
Deadly SARS-like virus is ready to infect humans, study shows
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
Researchers have found a virus poised to spread across the human populace with deadly results, according to a new study in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences journal.
In the study, researchers revealed a virus related the SARS virus and found in Chinese horseshoe bats could infect humans in its current form.
Virus could jump to humans quickly
“The capacity of this group of viruses to jump into humans is greater than we originally thought,” study author Vineet Menachery, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, said in press release. “While other adaptations may be required to produce an epidemic, several viral strains circulating in bat populations have already overcome the barrier of replication in human cells and suggest reemergence as a distinct possibility.”
In the study, researchers constructed viruses from viral DNA isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats, where SARS originated from, in order to assess their potential to infect human and mice cells. The study team was able to identify a virus they called WIV1-CoV that could connect to the same receptors as SARS. The study team also revealed the virus was able to efficiently thrive in cultured human airway tissues, indicating an ability to infect humans from the current bat hosts.
“To be clear, this virus may never jump to humans, but if it does, WIV1-CoV has the potential to seed a new outbreak with significant consequences for both public health and the global economy,” Menachery said.
The study team also found antibodies used to treat SARS were effective against WIV1-CoV, signaling a potential treatment option in the event of an outbreak. However, the researcher said scaling up production could be an issue in the event of an outbreak. Furthermore, genetic differences would prevent current vaccines against SARS from being effective against the newly-identified virus.
In the early 2000s, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) caused nearly 800 deaths and a worldwide panic. The study team said WIV1-CoV could produce similar results.
“This type of work generates information about novel viruses circulating in animal populations and develops resources to help define the threat these pathogens may pose to human populations,” said study author Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology at UNC. “It’s important to note that it’s not an approach that’s limited to SARS or SARS-like viruses. It can be applied to other emerging pathogens to helping us prepare for the next emergent virus, whether it be MERS, the Zika virus or something we haven’t even heard of yet.”
5 Fibromyalgia gardening tips to get you going this spring
Written By: Kate Supino
admin
As a person who suffers from the pain and discomfort of fibromyalgia, you’ve probably already given up many of the things that give you joy in life. You may have cut back on or eliminated your social activities, cut out engaging in recreational sports, or stopped doing family things. You may have even had to quit your job in order to deal with the issues of fibromyalgia. But if you find joy in gardening, you don’t have to let fibromyalgia steal that from your life, as well. Here are five fibromyalgia gardening tips to get you digging in the dirt again.
Grow a Vertical Garden
The pain of fibromyalgia often prohibits lots of walking and stooping. With a vertical garden, you drastically reduce the amount of movement necessary to grow, maintain and harvest your garden. The vertical garden can take many forms, and have dimensions that make you the most comfortable. There will be no need to reach high or bend down low if you don’t want.
Grow Plants in Tall Urns
Another way to virtually eliminate all bending is to grow your favorite plants in tall urns in the garden. Place them next to seating benches so that you can rest as you lazily apply fertilizer, prune plants or clip fresh flowers to bring indoors.
Have an Indoor Herb Garden
One of our favorite fibromyalgia gardening tips, because one of the easiest ways to garden and enjoy fresh herbs in your cooking is to grow an indoor herb garden. It doesn’t take much to set up. You can place all your potted herbs in an indoor window box for your kitchen window, or set up individual pots of herbs right near your cooking area. Either way, all you need to do is water every now and again and clip off your fresh herbs as needed.
Invest in a Sun Awning
Those reversible sun awnings that you see in magazines and on TV can provide true value to fibromyalgia sufferers. Often, strong heat is a source of great pain and discomfort, and it’s trigger for fibro flares in a lot of patients. With a large awning, however, you can enjoy tending to your potted garden plants under the cool shade of the awning. Choose plants that don’t like to be in full sun, and you should be able to grow healthy plants in no time.
Avoid High Pollen Season
Allergies are especially bothersome for fibromyalgia sufferers. Pay attention to your local weather forecast and avoid gardening outdoors on days when the pollen count is high. Spring is usually particularly high in pollen, but your region of the country will have its own peculiarities based on the natural plants and trees there.
You’ve already given up so much to fibromyalgia. Don’t let such a relaxing activity as gardening slip away. Use these fibromyalgia gardening tips to enjoy growing the flowers, fruits and vegetables that you love most.
Explorers discover shipwreck from Vasco de Gama’s fleet
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
A shipwreck discovered off the coast of Oman is likely the remains of the Esmeralda, a vessel that was part of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s fleet during his second voyage to India, the country’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture announced on Tuesday.
The wreckage, which was originally discovered in 1998 and excavated between 2013 and 2015, was likely one of the ships de Gama commanded when he returned in India in 1502 and 1503, a reportfrom researchers with Blue Water Recoveries and Bournemouth University in the UK and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington has concluded.
One of the ship’s bells found at the site. Credit: David Mearns, National Geographic
According to National Geographic and Gulf Business magazine, the study authors are still in the process of analyzing more than 2,500 objects recovered from the wreckage. However, their early findings, based on the discovery of a special Portuguese coin minted for trade with India (one of just two known to exist) and cannonballs engraved with the initials of de Gama’s maternal uncle, Vincente Sodré, commander of the Esmeralda, indicate that it was likely that vessel.
The discovery is expected to be formally announced later on today, and if it is confirmed to have been a ship from de Gama’s fleet, it would be the earliest vessel ever located and recovered from the Age of Exploration, the period between the mid-1500s and the 1700s viewed by many as the golden age of maritime exploration in Europe, the publications added.
Analyzing the bell gave researchers insight into the origins of the vessel. Credit: David Mearns, National Geographic
Portuguese coins, initialed cannonballs point to the Esmeralda
De Gama was put in charge of Portugal’s fourth expedition to India by King Dom Manuel I in 1502, according to Nat Geo. He commanded a fleet of 20 ships, including the Esmeralda, all of which were well-armed in case they encountered potentially hostile Muslim merchants.
When de Gama returned to from India to Lisbon in 1503, he left the Esmeralda and four other ships behind to protect Portuguese factories in southwestern India. Sodré and his colleagues left the area and sailed to the Gulf of Aden between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, where he led raids on Arab ships. That May, ignoring warnings of an incoming storm while docked at one of the the Khuriya Muriya Islands near modern-day Oman, Sodré’s ship was torn from its moorings and dashed against the rocks. The ship and its crew were lost at sea.
A gold coin found at the site. Credit: David Mearns, National Geograpic
In 1998, the 500th anniversary of da Gama’s discovery of the Carreira da India, David Mearns and his colleagues at Blue Water Recoveries began searching for the remains of the Esmeralda, and after just 20 minutes, they discovered cannonballs that clearly belonged to a European ship. They went on to discover more than 2,500 artifacts, including a ship’s bell that was revealed to contain the letter ‘M’ and the number ‘498,’ likely referring to the date 1498.
That would have been consistent with a vessel that had departed from Lisbon in 1502, Mearns told Nat Geo. They also found cannonballs carved with the initials ‘VS,’ likely Vincente Sodré, and led shot that has been matched to ore originally mined in Portugal, Spain and England. Also at the site were 12 gold Portuguese cruzado coins and a silver coin known as an índio which had been specially minted by Dom Manuel for trade with India in 1499.
Massive 11th century metal workshop discovered in modern-day Cambodia
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
An enormous bronze workshop has been found next to the Royal Palace of Angkor Thom—the capital city of the powerful Khmer Empire which once spread across a large part of Southeast Asia from roughly the 9th to 15th centuries CE.
At the empire’s height, the capital city grew to be about the size of modern Los Angeles, with about one million residents, and tens of thousands of bronze, silver, and gold statues were spread across the whole empire—although where they came from has long been a puzzle for archaeologists.
It was generally thought that such statues were “where they were to be installed or venerated,” according to site researcher Martin Polkinghorne in the Phnom Penh Post, but the evidence has been lacking, and now this massive workshop puts a hitch in that theory.
Cambodian archaeologists working at the dig site.
Evidence of metalworking
Originally thought to be a stone workshop, they uncovered evidence of extensive metalworking: half-finished bronze statues, large furnaces, chunks of unused metal, and crucibles that could hold about a half-gallon (2 liters) of molten metal. Carbon dating has now placed the workshop right at the height of the Khmer Empire, under the reign of god-king Jayavarman VII—between the 11th and 12th centuries CE.
This crucible was used to hold molten metal in the 11th century.
“We’ve demonstrated that there is a centralised workshop with very large-scale production,” Polkinghorne told the Post. “It was a great find. We were really excited.”
Which means that most if not all fabrication of these tens of thousands of statues happened in one place—right next to the Royal Palace—before being shipped to their respective locations. This now adds a new weight to the power of the elites, as the metals used in statues (copper, tin, gold, and more) were quite expensive. Creating statues, then, reinforced the power of elites while also demonstrating the might of the gods.
Piece of a leaded bronze 15.5cm statue found at the Angkor Thom Royal Palace dating to the late 12th/early 13th century. Credit: Brent Crane
This likely includes one of the most famous statues of Angkor, the West Mebon Vishnu, which is a car-sized fragment of a reclining Vishnu. It’s estimated that its full length was about 20 feet (6 meters) and took several months to make.
“Primarily, sculptures are important because they have power to restore and also communicate legitimacy,” Polkinghorne explained. “Artistic skill is a coveted and almost highly secret skillset that the king is tapping. He’s using that knowledge to legitimize himself.”
Archaeologists long wondered where something like the The West Mebon Vishnu could have been manufactured– and this workshop could be the answer
Of course, while this is a huge discovery, there are still some mysteries regarding the site. Its full boundaries are unknown—there might still be more—and where the metals came from to make all the statues is still unknown. In modern-day Cambodia—where the ruins of Angkor Thom are now found—there are no significant ore or metal deposits. Researchers hypothesize the metals were brought in via trade, but as of yet they aren’t certain.
Quitting cold turkey is the best way to stop smoking, study finds
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
When trying to quit smoking, health experts and smokers alike have long debated the effectiveness of slowly smoking fewer and fewer cigarettes versus going cold turkey.
According to a study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, those who quit cold turkey are more likely to have success than those who slowly try to phase out their habit.
Discovering how to quit smoking
To reach their findings, the study team recruited nearly 700 smokers who wanted to stop smoking.
“They were split into two groups. One group — the ‘abrupt cessation’ group — set a quit day and stopped all smoking on that day. The second group — the ‘gradual cessation’ group — set a quit day but gradually reduced their tobacco use in the two weeks leading up to that date,” Nicola Lindson-Hawley, an addiction specialist from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, said in a press release rom the university.
“Both groups had advice and support and access to nicotine patches and nicotine replacement therapy, like nicotine gum or mouth spray,” she added.
After quitting, participants were evaluated weekly for the next four weeks and then again after six months. Along with asking them how they were doing, the scientists assessed the quantity of carbon monoxide they were exhaling, an objective way to check if people were staying with their quitting plan.
At four weeks, 39 percent of the gradual group hadn’t smoked, as opposed to 49 percent of the cold turkey group, meaning that the cold turkey group was 25 percent more successful. The difference between the groups started on the first day, when more of the cold turkey group tried to quit as opposed to the gradual group.
“The difference in quit attempts seemed to arise because people struggled to cut down,” Lindson-Hawley said “It provided them with an extra thing to do, which may have put them off quitting altogether.
“If people actually made a quit attempt then the success rate was equal across groups,” she continued. “We also found that more people preferred the idea of quitting gradually than abruptly; however regardless of what they thought they were still more likely to quit in the abrupt group.”
The Oxford expert also said it is important to note the study included in people who wanted to quit soon, were getting counseling support and using nicotine replacement therapy.
“For these people the best advice appears to be to pick a day and stop smoking completely on that day,” Lindson-Hawley said. “However, as we found that at the start of the study many people cannot imagine being able to stop completely. For these people it is much better to attempt to cut down their smoking than do nothing at all and we should increase support for gradual cessation to increase their chances of succeeding.”
New Tyrannosaur species shows how T. Rex became such a fierce hunter
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
How did the Tyrannosaurus rex become one of the fiercest dinosaurs the planet has ever seen? By developing keen senses prior to the growth spurt that allowed it to grow to be as much as 13 feet tall and weigh close to seven metric tons, according to a new study.
According to lead researcher Dr. Steve Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences and his colleagues, the new remains of a horse-sized dinosaur recently unearthed in Uzbekistan shed new light on how and when tyrannosaurs became such fearsome predators.
As they explained in Monday’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fossils belonged to a newly identified species, Timurlengia euotica, that lived approximately 90 million years ago and which had much smaller bodies than T. rex and other tyrannosaurs.
Its discovery also fills a 20-million-year-gap in the tyrannosaur fossil record, the authors noted, showing how these horse-sized, 250 kilogram, long-legged, sharp-toothed, fast-running dinosaurs went on to evolve into the massive, intelligent carnivores that dominated the Earth about 66 million years ago. The secret, they said, was that tyrannosaurs developed brains before brawn.
This is a picture of a Timurlengia skeleton with bones shown. (Credit: Todd Marshall and Steve Brusatte)
“The ancestors of T. rex would have looked a whole lot like Timurlengia, a horse-sized hunter with a big brain and keen hearing that would put us to shame,” Dr. Brusatte said in a statement. “Only after these ancestral tyrannosaurs evolved their clever brains and sharp senses did they grow into the colossal sizes of T. rex. Tyrannosaurs had to get smart before they got big.”
Tyrannosaurs stayed small until late in their evolutionary history
Previously, experts were uncertain how tyrannosaurs became such massive and cunning hunters, the researchers explained. With the discovery of Timurlengia euotica, however, they can now see that their predecessors already had skull features indicative of highly-developed brains.
Early tyrannosaurs lived about 170 million years ago and were only a little bigger than humans, but over the next 100 million years, they began experiencing a growth spurt of epic proportions. By the end of the Cretaceous Period, they evolved into massive creatures such as the T. rex and the Albertosaurus, which could weight in excess of seven metric tons, the authors said.
Timurlengia euotica would have lived about 80 million years after tyrannosaurs first appeared, which Dr. Brusatte’s team said demonstrates that they only grew to their massive sizes near the tail end of their evolutionary history. Prior to that, they were smaller, highly intelligent hunters that likely preyed on duck-billed dinosaurs and other plant eaters, the researchers noted.
“The middle Cretaceous is a mysterious time in evolution because fossils of land-living animals from this time are known from very few places,” said co-author Professor Alexander Averianov of Saint Petersburg State University. “Uzbekistan is one of these places. The early evolution of many groups like tyrannosaurs took place in the coastal plains of central Asia in the mid Cretaceous.”
Blueberries could help prevent Alzheimer’s, says new study
Written By: John Hopton
Brian Galloway
As if there weren’t already enough reasons to love blueberries – not least their potential for lowering the risk of heart disease and cancer – new research has shown that they could also help to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s, according to a statement.
Researchers think the super fruit’s antioxidants can prevent the effects of a disease which currently affects 5.3 million Americans and could affect 7 million by 2025.
The research was presented at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), which features more than 12,500 presentations on a wide range of science topics.
“Our new findings corroborate those of previous animal studies and preliminary human studies, adding further support to the notion that blueberries can have a real benefit in improving memory and cognitive function in some older adults,” said Robert Krikorian, Ph.D., leader of the research team. He explained that the desirable effects could be due to flavonoids called anthocyanins, which have been shown to improve cognition in animals. Increased brain activity
Krikorian and colleagues at University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center followed earlier trials with two human studies.
One looked at 47 adults aged 68 and older with mild cognitive impairment, which is a risk condition for Alzheimer’s disease. They were given either freeze-dried blueberry powder – equivalent to a cup of berries – or a placebo powder once a day for 16 weeks.
“There was improvement in cognitive performance and brain function in those who had the blueberry powder compared with those who took the placebo,” Krikorian said. “The blueberry group demonstrated improved memory and improved access to words and concepts.” Those who took the blueberry powder also showed increased brain activity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The second study involved 94 people aged 62 to 80 who didn’t show cognitive issues but who subjectively felt their memories were declining. They were split into four groups who respectively were given blueberry powder, fish oil, fish oil and powder, or a placebo.
“The results were not as robust as with the first study,” Krikorian said “Cognition was somewhat better for those with powder or fish oil separately, but there was little improvement with memory.” The fMRI results were also not as impressive as with those receiving blueberry powder, although this could be due to the fact that the participants in the second study had less severe issues.
Krikorian explained that the two studies suggest blueberries may be more effective in treating patients with cognitive impairments, but may not show measurable benefit for those with minor memory issues or who have not yet developed cognitive problems.
Future studies on the benefits of blueberry consumption in fighting Alzheimer’s will look at people aged 50 to 65, some of who are at risk of developing the degenerative condition – such as those who are obese, have high blood pressure or high cholesterol.
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
When will we have a male birth control pill? Researchers say ‘soon’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
After several years of trying and multiple failed attempts, researchers believe that they are close to developing an oral contraceptive for men, according to new research presented Sunday at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
By tweaking promising experimental compounds, Jillian Kyzer, a graduate student working with Dr. Gunda I. Georg at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy, and her colleagues said they have made progress towards a pill that would pause fertility in males without any significant side effects – some 50 years after a similar product was first released for women.
Such a pill “would have to be soluble so it could be taken by mouth,” Dr. George said, according to the Daily Mail. “It would start working fairly quickly and it wouldn’t diminish libido. It would be safe even if taken for decades,” and since some users may eventually want to have children, it would have to be “reversible, with no lingering ill effects on sperm or embryos.”
“That’s a very high bar for bringing a male contraceptive to market,” she added, noting that these difficulties have caused many scientists to throw in the towel. Her team continues their search for the perfect male birth control pill recipe, however, saying that it “would be wonderful to provide couples with a safe alternative because some women cannot take birth control pills.” Hybrid compounds could hold the key
As Kyzer explained in a statement, testosterone is being studied as a potential contraceptive for men, because it can cause infertility at certain doses. However, it is ineffective in one-fifth of all males and can lead to side effects such as weight gain and a decrease in HDL cholesterol levels.
Last year, scientists identified an enzyme used by sperm to penetrate the egg, which is a potential target for an oral contraceptive, and some drug companies are working on experimental products of their own. However, they note, some – such as a compound being developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb, is effective at inhibiting fertility, but is not soluble and cannot be taken orally.
Another experimental compound being developed by the pharmaceutical company can be taken orally, but has proven to be less selective about what it targets. Not only does it interact with the intended target, retinoic acid receptor-α, but with other receptors not involved with fertility. As a result, it could result in harmful side effects, Kyzer and her colleagues explained.
The researchers are working to build on Bristol-Myers Squibb’s work by developing substances similar in nature to the company’s products in terms of chemical structure, and their work has led them to find several small changes than can be made to alter how these test compounds affect the body. For instance, they found adding a polar group to the first molecule would increase its solubility, and replacing an amide bond with similar, but slightly different bonds enhanced their stability, allowing them to last longer after being taken.
Unfortunately, these alterations also reduced the specificity of the compounds, but the group is making progress and plans to continue refining the compound’s chemical structures. Their quest for a male contraceptive that can be taken orally, is stable and performs as expected, without harmful side effects, will now lead them to investigate hybrid compounds that use scaffolds and borrow structural features from other compounds known to interact with retinoic acid receptors.
—– Image credit: Thinkstock
Google’s AI defeats Go champion 3-0, but humans strike back
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
The Google-developed computer program, AlphaGo, may have defeated international Go champion Lee Se-Dol 3-0 in a best of five series, but today Lee struck back, finally winning his first game in a five-game match in Soeul.
The match was part of a competition for a $1 million prize: If AlphaGo won, the money would go to charity, whereas if Lee won, he would get the dough. The game Go has long been considered the Mount Everest of Artificial Intelligence—there are more possible move configurations than there are atoms in the universe—with true mastery (thought to be) only possible for humans.
Naturally, shock resonated around the world, and Lee—who has ranked at the top of the world for a lot of the past 10 years and who has 18 international titles under his belt—didn’t take his initial three losses lightly.
“I don’t know what to say, but I think I have to express my apologies first,” he said at a post-game press conference, according to Phys.org. “I apologise for being unable to satisfy a lot of people’s expectations. I kind of felt powerless.”
“Yes, I do have extensive experience in playing the game of Go, but there was never a case where I was under this much pressure…and I was incapable of overcoming it,” Lee added.
Humanity striking back
But now Lee managed to deal the first blow against AlphaGo, whose total record is now 9 and 1—a record that includes a 2015 5-0 victory over Fan Hui, the champion Go player of Europe.
The error came during move 79, according to Demis Hassabis, the founder of the group that created AlphaGo, Google Deepmind. The AI “thought it was doing well, but got confused,” he said, according to The Verge.
“I’ve never been congratulated so much just because I won one game!” said Lee during a post-game conference, adding that this single win felt more valuable after having lost.
It seems that even the creators of the AI are pleased with the results—as it will help them make the program stronger down the line.
“Lee Se-dol is an incredible player and he was too strong for AlphaGo today,” said Hassabis. “For us this loss is very valuable. We’re not sure what happened yet.”
Europe and Russia prepare to launch life-sensing Martian orbiter
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Europe and Russia are about to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars so that it can sniff out potential alien life—in this case, literally, as it is tasked with “smelling” what may be gaseous proof that life once existed on the planet.
The project, known as ExoMars 2016, is a two-phase collaborative project between the European Space Agency and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. Currently, an orbiter known as the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is slated to take off at 5:31 am EST (9:31 GMT) on Monday from Kazakhstan. After being launched by a Russian Proton rocket, it will begin its 308 million mile (496 million kilometer) journey to Mars, where it will arrive on October 19th.
TGO’s main mission when it arrives? To photograph Mars and use its array of high-tech instruments to determine “whether Mars is ‘alive’ today,” according to the European Space Agency.
Watch the livestream here beginning at 5:00am EST :
The Red Planet is particularly enigmatic in terms of its gasses because of the levels of methane it contains in its atmosphere. Normally, methane is destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years of its creation—implying that methane is somehow still being produced today. Of course, methane can be produced by geological chemical processes involving hot liquid water under the planet’s surface. Or, it could be the product of a biological process—like microbes leading to the decomposition of organic material.
The TGO, then, aims to analyze the methane on Mars in an attempt to figure out where it’s coming from.
“TGO will be like a big nose in space,” said Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist.
Of course, TGO brings with it another important aspect of the plan: A module known as Schiaparelli, which is designed to test heat shields and parachutes for the sake of phase two of the ESA-Russia mission—landing a rover on Mars.
Credit: ESA
But after Schiaparelli lands on the planet surface, its job won’t be done: It will then measure atmospheric particles, winds speeds, and temperatures on Mars. TGO meanwhile is slated to continue its mission until December 2017, although it has enough fuel to last years beyond that.
Phase two, though—which is set to launch in 2018—may never get off the ground: “We need some more money,” said ESA director general Jan Woerner, who hypothesized a possible two-year delay in launching the rover thanks to cost increases.
Regardless, though, phase one is set to launch Monday, and may bring us exciting news yet.
“Establishing whether life ever existed on Mars, even at a microbial level, remains one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time,” said the ESA, “and one that lies at the heart of the ExoMars programme.”
Experts warn that rare European seabird may be extinct by 2076
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Despite having been spotted at the coastal village of Blakeney in Norfolk for the first time this week, one of the UK’s rarest seabirds will likely become extinct within the next 60 years unless drastic action is taken, according to a new Journal of Applied Ecology study.
The Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus), a medium-sized shearwater that is part of the seabird family Procellariidae, is typically spotted far out to see off the coast of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and west Wales, but as The Guardian reported on Friday, it was spotted at the village on the east coast for the first time ever during a recent nature survey in the area.
Even so, researchers from the University of Oxford Department of Zoology told BBC News that the critically endangered seabird – one of the rarest creatures of its kind on Earth – will be driven to extinction in less than six decades unless more is done to keep them from becoming tangled in fishing gear and drowning, or from being hunted by cats and other small mammals.
“The survival of adults from one year to the next and especially of young adults is much lower than we thought,” explained Professor Tim Guilford, co-author of the study and an instructor of animal behavior at Oxford. “The species is unsustainable – it is on the road to extinction.”
Nighttime fishing could help prevent the shearwater’s extinction
The approximately 33 centimeter-long bird, which has a wingspan of up to 90 centimeters, lays only one egg at a time and breeds in the coastal cliffs in the Balearic islands. At times, however, it sometimes finds its way into British waters while migrating north, BBC News explained.
There are only an estimated 3,000 breeding pairs of the Balearic shearwater left in the world, the researchers said, and nearly half of all deaths of this critically endangered species are due to their entrapment in fishing lines and nets. Seabed fishing is particularly dangerous to the birds, as they can be caught in the lines when they are immersed and drown, according to the authors.
“Population projections suggest that the actual impact of fisheries on Balearic shearwaters is unsustainable,” they wrote. “This study demonstrates that reducing the bycatch rates of fisheries is an unavoidable and urgent conservation measure for avoiding the extinction of the species.”
They are calling for “demographic long-term studies” that would “allow researchers to diagnose, with reliability, the effectiveness of management actions.” However, as Guilford told BBC News there are some simple actions that could help protect the species. For instance, setting up fishing gear during the night when the birds do not dive “could make a massive difference,” he said.
Rare 3,400 year old glass beads found in Danish tomb were made in King Tut’s workshop
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Glass beads discovered in 3,400-year-old Danish graves were Egyptian in origin, and made by King Tutankhamun’s workshop, Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Thursday.
The beads were found in the Nordic burial sites by a team of Danish and French archaeologists, the publication explained, and nearly two-dozen of them were blue, which was said to be a rare color during the Bronze Age. Their discovery indicates that trade routes between the Levant and northern Europe may have been established as early as the 13th century BCE.
Jeanette Varberg, an archaeologist and curator at the Moesgaard Museumwho was involved in the research, told Haaretz that blue glass was “the next best thing” to Lapis lazuli, a blue-colored semi-precious gemstone that would have been the most valuable bauble of its kind in the Nordic Late Bronze age. “In the north it must have been almost magic,” she added.
One of the beads was found buried along with a Bronze Age woman at a gravesite in the town of Olby in Denmark, the researchers said, while another was discovered in a necklace together with four pieces of amber at the burial location of a second woman. Twenty-three beads were found in all, and were analyzed using a non-destructive technique known as plasma-spectrometry.
Detail of a string of beads. Credit: Roberto Fortuna and Kira Ursem
Egyptians likely received Nordic amber in exchange for beads
That analysis revealed that the beads buried with the women were created at a workshop located in Amarna, the capital city newly established and built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten during the late 18th Dynasty and abandoned following his death in 1332 BCE. Glass from this same workshop was used in Tutankhamun’s deathmask during his funeral in 1323 BCE, noted Haaretz.
While glass beads were viewed primarily as a luxury among the ancient Egyptians, are were not frequently used outside of the graves of the elite, Varberg and colleague Dr. Kaul Flemming, the curator of prehistory at the National Museum of Denmark, believe that Egypt likely traded beads to Denmark in exchange for amber, which was abundant in that country and frequently traded.
Detail of a glass bead. Credit: Roberto Fortuna and Kira Ursem
Previously, Nordic amber has been discovered in Greece and Syria, and the newfound beads are evidence that trade between the north and south had been established as early as 3,000 years ago, the newspaper said. The beads would have been shipped along the same routes at the amber was, the researchers said, traveling from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the northern nations.
Such trade continued until about 1200 BCE, Flemming said, when it appears “to have collapsed” likely due to conflict and the rise of the seafaring raiders known as the Sea Peoples. The collapse “can also be observed in the Nordic burials,” he said, as “fewer glass beads seem to have reached the north” while new bead-making workshops began to appear in Italy around this time.
‘Year In Space’ astronaut Scott Kelly announces retirement
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Just weeks after returning to Earth following a nearly one-year stint on the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has announced his plans to hang up his spacesuit on April 1, officials at the agency confirmed in a Friday night press release.
Kelly, who joined NASA in 1996 and is currently the record holder for the most time spent in space by an American (540 days), will continue to provide medical samples and support testing as part of the ongoing research associated to his 340-day stay on the ISS, the agency said.
“This year-in-space mission was a profound challenge for all involved, and it gave me a unique perspective and a lot of time to reflect on what my next step should be on our continued journey to help further our capabilities in space and on Earth,” Kelly explained in a statement.
“My career with the Navy and NASA gave me an incredible chance to showcase public service to which I am dedicated, and what we can accomplish on the big challenges of our day,” he said. “I am humbled and excited by new opportunities for me to support and share the amazing work NASA is doing to help us travel farther into the solar system and work with the next generation of science and technology leaders.”
A look back at Scott Kelly’s long, illustrious career
Kelly was born on February 21, 1964 in Orange, New Jersey. He earned a bachelor degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York Maritime College in 1987 and a master’s degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1996.
The father of two daughters, Scott Kelly joined NASA in April 1996 after several years of service in the US Navy. During his career as an astronaut, he flew in space four times, with the first on the space shuttle Discovery crew that traveled to the Hubble Space Telescope as part of STS-103 in 1999. His first trip to the ISS came as commander of the STS-118 mission in 2007.
Most recently, he agreed to spend nearly an entire year on the space station as part of a project to see what impact such a prolonged stay in microgravity would have on the human body. While he was orbiting the Earth, his twin brother Mark remained on the ground so that scientists could see how the different environments affected the anatomy and physiology of two astronauts.
“Scott’s contributions to NASA are too many to name,” said Brian Kelly, director of Flight Operations at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “In his year aboard the space station, he took part in experiments that will have far-reaching effects, helping us pave the way to putting humans on Mars and benefiting life on Earth.”
“His passion for this work has helped give hundreds of thousands of people a better understanding of what NASA does, thanks in part to the numerous photos and updates he shared from space,” Brian Kelly added. “We appreciate his years of service and anticipate many benefits to come from them, thanks to the research he’s supporting.”
Looters lead archaeologists to treasure-filled tomb of ‘Etruscan princess’
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Looters and treasure hunters are usually the bane of archaeologists, but in the case of a treasure-filled Etruscan tomb recently uncovered—which likely belonged to a princess—looters played an unusually helpful hand in its discovery.
“We had no idea the tomb was there, but carried out an emergency dig last month after we noticed looters had excavated another tomb that was above the princess’s tomb,” a worker of the site in Vulci, Italy, Tecla Del Papa, told The Local.
View of the tomb from the outside.
“The robbers had revealed, but not entered, the tomb below, so thanks to them, we were able to quickly find the burial chamber and quickly excavate it.”
The tomb is actually located right in front of the ticket office for entrance to Vulci, an ancient Italian city—but is nearly 10 feet (three meters) underground. The tomb itself is nearly 3,000 years old, dating back to the eighth century BCE. It belonged to a member of the Etruscans, an ancient Italic people whose empire warred with ancient Rome from the city’s founding, according to Livy. Despite this antagonism, though, Etruscan culture had an enormous influence on Rome—and eventually their empire assimilated into the Roman Republic in the fourth century BCE.
Inside the burial, which is now being called the Tomb of the Golden Scarab, they believe they have found the remains of a princess: the bones, belonging to a young girl, were wrapped in precious, fragile cloth and were surrounded by various treasures—like a Phoenician amber necklace; two Egyptian scarabs made from gold, ivory, and silver; rare pottery; and beautiful pieces of jewelry like fibulae—large brooches used to fasten clothing.
Some of the jewelry found in the tomb.
“Certainly such items lead us to believe that she was a princess, if not someone very important in society,” said Del Papa.
The next step for the archaeologists is to figure out just who this girl was, and what her life was like 2,800 years ago. Meanwhile, more extensive excavations of the grave site are planned for early April.
Two of the artifacts discovered in the tomb
A silver artifact found in the tomb.
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All images credit of: Archeological site of VulciI
Ice buildup on your car’s windshield can be an annoying problem, but the problem of ice buildup becomes deadly when it happens on the wings of an airplane.
To combat this problem, researchers from the University of Michigan have developed a new ice-repellant coating that facilitates the removal of ice with just the force of gravity or a stiff breeze.
According to a press release, the new coating is cheap, durable, see-though, and rubbery to the touch. The team behind its development said the coating could be used to prevent ice buildup on everything from car windshields, to power lines, to freezer defrosting systems. Their work was recently published in an edition of the journal Science Advances.
Water repellent solutions aren’t the answer
“Researchers had been trying for years to dial down ice adhesion strength with chemistry, making more and more water-repellent surfaces,” said Kevin Golovin, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan. “We’ve discovered a new knob to turn, using physics to change the mechanics of how ice breaks free from a surface.”
The team had initially looking to expand on the capabilities of water-repellant materials, but experiments kept showing these materials can’t sufficiently be reengineered to shed ice as well as they do water.
Ultimately, the team realized that the ability to repel water is essential to repelling ice. They saw that the crucial attribute is the ability for the coating to deform with even the slightest amount of force, a principle known as “interfacial cavitation.”
“Nobody had explored the idea that rubberiness can reduce ice adhesion,” said team member Anish Tuteja, associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan. “Ice is frozen water, so people assumed that ice-repelling surfaces had to also repel water. That was very limiting.”
The team has discovered that by marginally changing the smoothness and rubberiness of the coating, they could fine-tune its level of ice repellency and durability. Softer surfaces were found to be more ice-repellent but less durable, while the reverse was found for harder coatings. Golovin said that versatility will enable them to develop coatings for a massive range of applications.
The new coatings also stood up to a various lab tests including peeling, corrosion, temperature, abrasion and freeze-thaw cycle trials.
“An airplane coating, for example, would need to be extremely durable, but it could be less ice-repellent because of high winds and vibration that would help push ice off,” Golovin said. “A freezer coating, on the other hand, could be less durable, but would need to shed ice with just the force of gravity and slight vibrations. The great thing about our approach is that it’s easy to fine-tune it for any given application.”
“I think the first commercial application will be in linings for commercial frozen food packaging, where sticking is often a problem. We’ll probably see that within the next year,” Tuteja added. “Using this technology in places like cars and airplanes will be very complex because of the stringent durability and safety requirements, but we’re working on it.”
SLS rocket engine undergoes successful test fire in preparation for 2018 launch
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The engine powering NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) and carry American astronauts to nearby asteroids (and ultimately to Mars) was successfully test fired for a period of 500 seconds on Thursday, the space agency said in a statement.
The Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 rocket engine, a liquid-fuel cryogenic rocket engine which had previously been used to power the now-retired space shuttles from the 1980s through 2011, was being used for the first time in nearly five years, according to Engadget and Ars Technica.
The test-firing took place at the John C. Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi and marks the first test of an RS-25 flight engine for the new SLS, which the agency plans to transport crew on all future deep space missions. Four RS-25s producing a combined two million pounds of thrust will be used to power the SLS core stage on those voyages, NASA noted.
“Not only does this test mark an important step towards proving our existing design for SLS’s first flight,” said Steve Wofford, engine manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, “but it’s also a great feeling that this engine that has carried so many astronauts into space before is being prepared to take astronauts to space once again.”
Additional tests planned before initial, unmanned test flight
The engines that will be used on the first SLS missions are leftovers from the shuttle program, and were used on more than 130 missions between 1981 and 2011, the agency said. Thursday’s tests were designed by NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne to demonstrate that a new controller for the engines would work as planned, and to verify the necessary operating conditions.
According to Engadget, the two firms conducted several similar tests on this same engine last year. Following this week’s successful test-fire, they will not begin work on new flight engine controllers, and plan to continue testing the engine to prepare for the SLS’s first launch, which NASA previously reportedis scheduled to take place no later than November 2018.
Furthermore, NASA is working on a test stand that will be similar to the one used on the core stage’s first flight, Exploration Mission-1 (which will be an unmanned launch involving the rocket and the Orion spacecraft). The upcoming tests will involve the installation of the flight core stage onto the new stand and firing four RS-25 engines simultaneously, the agency said.
Ars Technica noted that, following the end of the shuttle program, six RS-25s were salvaged to be used for SLS launches. The agency also awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $1.16 billion contract to resume production of the engines, which were originally designed to be reused but will now only be used once, as only the SLS capsule will return to Earth following completion of a mission.
New, less dense ‘hot Jupiter’ exoplanets discovered using Kepler data
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Two newly-identified “hot Jupiter” exoplanets discovered using data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft during its second-generation K2 mission are less dense than our Jupiter, which could make them good candidates for in-depth, follow-up studies about their atmospheres.
According to UPIand Phys.org reports, the two planets have been designated EPIC210957318b and EPIC212110888b and were discovered using what is known as the radial velocity method, a technique that uses observations of Doppler shifts in a host star to find new worlds indirectly .
Lead researcher Rafael Brahm of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and his colleagues examined the signatures of these two exoplanets, each of which are approximately the same mass as Jupiter but orbit their suns at a much closer distance (hence the name “hot Jupiter”) and found that they passed in front of their stars around once every three to four days.
The transit properties encoded in their shadows’ signature, including the depths, the shapes, and the duration of their passage in front of their suns, indicate that both worlds are “strong Jovian planetary candidates,” the authors explained in a papercurrently available online and which has been submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Good candidates for follow-up research, the authors claim
While Jupiter orbits the sun at a distance of 5.2 astronomical units (AU) and takes 11.86 years to complete its journey, hot Jupiters are far closer (orbiting their host stars at distances of 0.015 AU to 0.5 AU) and typically taking less than 10 days to orbit their suns, UPI and Phys.org said.
EPIC210957318b is the smaller of the two exoplanets, the study authors noted. It is 0.65 Jupiter masses in size, meaning that its mass is somewhere between that of Jupiter and Saturn. It orbits a sun-like star located 970 light-years from Earth, and takes 4.1 days to travel around the star.
The other planet, EPIC212110888b is larger (1.63 Jupiter masses) and hotter (it has an average surface temperature of between 932 and 1,430 degrees Celsius, compared to 584 to 939 degrees Celsius for EPIC210957318b). EPIC212110888b orbits a star that is larger than the sun, and is located 1,270 light-years away, Brahm’s team reported in their study.
Both planets have densities roughly half that of Jupiter’s, and the physical and orbital properties of their systems are described as typical of those where other, similar exoplanets have been found, the scientists explained. The low densities of the planets make them prime candidates for follow-up studies, through which the researchers hope to learn more about their atmospheres.
“Both planets were validated probabilistically and confirmed via precision radial velocity (RV) measurements,” they wrote. “They have physical and orbital properties similar to the ones of the already uncovered population of hot Jupiters and are well-suited candidates for further orbital and atmospheric characterization via detailed follow-up observations.”
Newly discovered 250-million year old reptile is ‘extraordinary’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Experts from the University of Birmingham and the Universidade Federal do Pampa (Unipampa) have discovered a new fossilized reptile species that would have lived approximately 250 million years ago, shortly after a mass extinction event that wiped out 90 percent of all life on Earth.
The creature, which was identified using a nearly-complete and well-preserved skull found in a Triassic rock exposure near São Francisco de Assis in southern Brazil last year, has been named Teyujagua paradoxa, Dr. Felipe Pinheiro, a paleobiologist at Unipama noted in a study published in Friday’s edition of the journal Scientific Reports.
Photographs and interpretative drawings of the skull. (Credit: Dr. Felipe Pinheiro et al.)
According to the authors, Teyujagua means “fierce lizard” in the language of the Guarani, and the name refers to a mythological creature, the Teyú Yaguá, which has the body of a lizard and the head of a dog. The real-life Teyujagua is described as a cross between primitive reptiles from the era and more evolved creatures known as archosauriformes, a group made up of the now-extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs (flying reptiles), as well as modern birds and crocodiles.
What makes the discovery of this new creature so important is that it lived shortly after the great Permo-Triassic mass extinction that took place 252 million years ago and was likely caused by a series of intense volcanic eruptions. Teyujagua’s discovery sheds new light onto how land-based ecosystems recovered from and developed in the aftermath of that event, the authors said.
Creature could help uncover the origins of the dinosaurs
Described as a small, four-legged creature that only grew to about 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length, the Teyujagua and its closest relatives would go on to become the dominant land animals of the era and would eventually go on to evolve into dinosaurs. It had recurved, sharply pointed teeth with fine serrations, indicating that the creature was a meat-eater.
Based on the placement of its nostrils on the upper part of its snout, the reptile was likely at least semi-aquatic, similar to modern-day crocodiles. Dr. Pinheiro and his collleagues believe that the species likely lived along the edges of rivers or lakes, hunting now-extinct, small-bodied, lizard-like reptiles known as procolophonids and amphibians. Excavations at the site are ongoing, and the researchers believe that more discoveries about the Teyujagua will follow.
Details of the reptile’s skull. (Credit: Dr. Felipe Pinheiro et al.)
In a statement, Dr. Pinheiro called the discovery of the new species “really exciting,” adding that from the first moment they saw the skull, “we knew we had something extraordinary in our hands. Back in the lab, after slowly exposing the bones, the fossil exceeded our expectations. It had a combination of features never seen before, indicating the unique position of Teyujagua in the evolutionary tree of an important group of vertebrates.”
“Teyujagua is a really important discovery because it helps us understand the origins of a group of vertebrates called archosauriforms,” added Dr. Richard Butler from the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. The new species “fills an evolutionary gap between archosauriforms and more primitive reptiles and helps us understand how the archosauriform skull first evolved,” he concluded.
Perfect ‘invisibility cloaks’ are impossible, study claims
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Bad news for anyone who’s dreamed of pretending to be Harry Potter with his Cloak of Invisibility: Making a perfect invisibility cloak in real life might be physically impossible, at least according to a new paper in Physical Review A.
The authors—Jad Halimeh at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany and Robert Thompson at the University of Otago, New Zealand—came to this conclusion after studying the limitations currently imposed on invisibility technology.
For example, special relativity—a theory proposed by Albert Einstein that describes how light and matter moves at high speeds—limits cloaks’ invisibility. As the wearer of the cloak moves, obvious visual distortions would appear, making them only partially transparent.
“In principle, what this paper shows is that invisibility cloaking is not possible for all observers,” Halimeh told Phys.org. “Real invisibility cloaks will have to stay in the realm of fiction. Your cloak, if it is to be pragmatically broadband, will pretty much look like the Predator’s, giving away what it hides via distortions when you move relative to it.”
Or, for a visual:
Light’s role in invisibility
The general idea behind invisibility cloaks is that the cloak diverts light around an object—making it appear that nothing is there. But of course, this has one major problem: The fact that light must move around the object and not through it means it takes longer for the light to reach behind it—which also can cause noticeable distortions.
There is a way to get around this, which has been explored by other research. Namely, if you don’t block the full spectrum of light, but instead focus on just one frequency—like the frequency for red—it is possible to create a cloak without the time delay issue.
Of course, then you have a cloak that only blocks a single frequency of light—which has obvious limitations—but besides, that, previous research has shown that even those cloaks don’t work if the object underneath is moving too fast. This is because of the relativistic Doppler Effect: The frequency of incoming light is changed, meaning it no longer matches the frequency the cloak is designed for—rendering it useless.
There is another option the researchers investigated: amplitude cloaks. These cloaks preserve the amplitude of light (the “power” of the waves), but not the phase (roughly, the relationship of different waves to each other). Phase is the part that is affected by the time delay, so by nixing this, one could create an invisibility cloak that blocks light across the spectrum without distortions.
Unfortunately, though, the researchers found that once again movement would render this cloak partially visible, as distortions would appear thanks to something known as the Fresnel-Fizeau drag. As it turns out, light travelling through a medium—like a cloak—would drag the light along with it, making the invisibility become distorted.
“Although our results may be disappointing for would-be wizards, understanding the limitations of cloaking devices is actually important in real life,” said Thompson. “New technologies are beginning to emerge from cloaking research, and we’re looking for effects that could either compromise the functionality of these technologies, or which could be exploited for some new practical purpose in the future.”
Rosetta’s comet found to be as old as our solar system
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Ice on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, better known as the object that the ESA’s Rosetta orbiter has been tracking since August 2014, formed at approximately the same time as the solar system itself, according to a new Astrophysical Journal Letters study.
They then compared the results of that analysis with data from laboratories studying amorphous ice, as well as models describing the composition of ice capable of trapping gas molecules. They found that it has argon and nitrogen levels that corresponded to those of gas hydrate models, and one one-hundredth as much argon as can be trapped in amorphous ice, the Daily Mail said.
This discovery confirms that the ice in Comet 67P has a crystalline structure, which as Popular Scienceexplained means that its water molecules are arranged in a neat, orderly pattern. If the ice was found to have been amorphous, with disordered water molecules, it may have indicated that the comet originally formed in interstellar space, outside of the solar system.
Findings indicate the comet formed in the protosolar nebula
However, since the comet’s surface ice is crystalline, it means that the water was allowed to cool relatively slowly – in the cooling nebular of the early solar system, for instance. Comet 67P’s ice most likely formed between -378.4 degrees and -369.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the authors said.
Based on their observations, the scientists believe that the ice on Rosetta’s comet likely formed at approximately the same time as the solar system, roughly 4.6 billion years ago, the Daily Mail and Popular Science explained. Specifically, the crystalline structure indicates that it formed in the protosolar nebula, a cloud of gas and dust that preceded the solar system’s formation.
The observations indicate that the protosolar nebula would have been hot and dense enough to turn ice from the interstellar medium into gas, the researchers explained. The findings mean that scientists can now determine the age of comets, and the research could provide new insight into the formation of the solar system – particularly the gas giants and their moons (which scientists believe formed as the result of the agglomeration of crystalline ice).
Rosetta, which launched in 2004 and spend 10 years traveling to Comet 67P, will continue to monitor and collect data through September, at which time it will slowly descent and eventually crash-land onto the surface of the object. It will continue to gather information and collect new images right up until the moment of impact.
Food preparation changed the course of human evolution, study finds
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Humans love to try to find what makes us different from other animals, but as it turns out, the difference might not be exactly what you’d expect: We spend a lot less time and energy chewing food. In fact, it was this very difference that pushed us to evolve into humans, according to a new study out of Harvard.
A normal human might spend a few hours eating, but our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, spend half of every day chewing—a difference that started two or three million years ago, when our ancestors added meat to their diet and began to process food using stone tools.
Fire wasn’t invented for another 1.5 to 2.5 million years—and the researchers were curious about what ancient humans did when cooking wasn’t an option. They hypothesized that processing raw food by slicing or pounding it drastically decreased chewing effort, to the point that our ancestors began to evolve different head and facial features—granting us smaller mouths and larger brains.
Studying chewing patterns
To test this idea, the team recruited participants to come chew vegetables and raw, sliced, pounded, or cooked goat meat—which they approximated was the best equivalent to the game early humans ate—while the researchers used instruments to measure how much jaw effort was needed to chew. After chewing the food to the point where they would normally swallow, it was spit out and analyzed.
“What we found was that humans cannot eat raw meat effectively with their low-crested teeth. When you give people raw goat, they chew and chew and chew, and most of the goat is still one big clump – it’s like chewing gum,” said co-author Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, in a statement. “But once you start processing it mechanically, even just slicing it, the effects on chewing performance are dramatic.”
In fact, according to the study in Nature, by using these simple processing techniques, ancestral humans made 20 percent fewer chews per day—adding up to 2.5 million fewer chews per year. Cutting or pounding the food into smaller pieces also made it much easier for our stomachs to digest.
The evolution of the ability to chew food into smaller particles gave mammals a big boost of extra energy because smaller particles have a higher surface area to volume ratio, allowing digestive enzymes to then break food down more efficiently,” said Lieberman.
Naturally, this allowed us to save enormous amounts of time and energy all around—which had huge consequences.
“With the origin of the genus Homo…we went from having snouts and big teeth and large chewing muscles to having smaller teeth, smaller chewing muscles, and snoutless faces,” Lieberman said.
“Those changes, and others, allowed for selection for speech and other shifts in the head, like bigger brains. Underlying that, to some extent, is the simplest technology of all: slicing meat into smaller pieces, and pounding vegetables before you chew them.”
LHC discovery could lead to fifth fundamental force, breakdown of standard model
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
The discovery of a particle six times heavier than the Higgs boson during December experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) suggests that there may be a new set of particles, and maybe even a fifth fundamental force not described by the standard model of particle physics.
The particle in question is known as the B meson, and according to ScienceAlert and the Daily Mail, the standard model dictates that it should have to decay at specific angles and frequencies. However, what researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) found during their experiments did not match-up with predictions of the particle’s behavior.
“Up to now all measurements match the predictions of the standard model. However, we know that the standard model cannot explain all the features of the Universe,” lead researcher Mariusz Witek of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences said in a statement, adding that there are many questions that have been left unanswered under the standard model, including how matter became dominant over antimatter.
In the case of the B mesons, the newfound particle would be influencing how it decays. While CERN researchers emphasize that it is too early to definitively say that this is a new discovery, if confirmed, it would be “completely beyond the Standard Model, and the tip of an iceberg of a large new set of particles,” John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at King’s College London, told the Daily Mail.
Additional experiments set for April could confirm the discovery
Two detectors at the Geneva-based particle collider, ATLAS and CMS, were on the hunt for new physics by counting particle decays resulting in two photons last December when they produced data hinting at the existence of a particle six-times heavier than the Higgs boson, reports indicate. Both experiments saw photons with a combined energy of 750 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
As Einstein’s equations dictate, particles release energy equivalent to their mass multiplied by the speed of light squared when they decay into photons. This means that the particle produced by these photons may be a yet unidentified particle with this precise amount of energy in the form of its mass. However, CERN noted that the readings may also just be an irregularity in the measurements, and plan to conduct additional experiments in April to find out for sure.
If this new particle does in fact exist, it would be a major discovery. Its existence had not been predicted by the Standard Model, which states that everything in the universe is made from the building blocks known as fundamental particles and that those particles are governed by a group of four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear). The new particle would not fit into the Standard Model’s description, opening up the possibility that there is a new set of undiscovered particles out there waiting to be found.
In addition, the research suggests that there may even be a fifth fundamental force that we don’t yet know about. Ellis told the Daily Mail that this is “possible, but there must at least be a set of unknown particles to explain how this new particle decays, and probably how it is produced.” To confirm this as a new discovery, ScienceAlert said that CERN needs to hit a standard deviation above 5 sigma, meaning there is a less than one-in-3.5 million chance of an error. Their current standard deviation is 3.4 sigma.
“To put it in terms of the cinema, where we once only had a few leaked scenes from a much-anticipated blockbuster, the LHC has finally treated fans to the first real trailer,” Witek added. He and his colleagues have published their findings in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
Bionic fingertip restores amputee’s sense of touch
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
An amputee has become the first person on Earth to successfully identify texture using a bionic fingertip. The new unit stimulates his nerves, the team reported Tuesday in the journal eLife.
The bionic fingertip, which was developed by Silvestro Micera of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Calogero Oddo of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSA) and their colleagues, was surgically connected to the nerves in the injured man’s upper arm and purportedly allowed him to feel smoothness and roughness in real time.
Furthermore, the study authors noted that the they have found a way to stimulate the nerves of non-amputees so that they could feel roughness without the need for surgery, which means that prosthetic devices could be safely tested on people without such injuries. They believe that their work may open up new avenues for the development of enhanced bionic prostheses.
“The stimulation felt almost like what I would feel with my hand,” the implant recipient, Dennis Aabo Sørensen, said in a statement. “I still feel my missing hand, it is always clenched in a fist. I felt the texture sensations at the tip of the index finger of my phantom hand.”
Research could lead to prosthetics with improved touch resolution
The researchers implanted electrodes above his injury and connected the device to nerves in his arm. A machine then controlled the fingertip’s movement over different pieces of plastic with different textures, and as it moves, the sensors generated an electrical signal.
That signal was translated into a series of electrical spikes designed to imitate the firing of sensory nerves. Sørensen correctly distinguished between rough and smooth surfaces 96 percent of the time, building on previous research where implants allowed him to recognize shapes.
The same texture-identification experiment was conducted, without the need for surgery, on non-amputees using needles that were temporarily attached to the arm’s median nerve. These individuals could determine whether a surface was rough or smooth 77 percent of the time, the EPFL and SSSA researchers added, and by studying the brain waves of these individuals, they may be able to improve touch resolution in prosthetic devices.
“This study merges fundamental sciences and applied engineering: it provides additional evidence that research in neuroprosthetics can contribute to the neuroscience debate, specifically about the neuronal mechanisms of the human sense of touch,” said Oddo. “It will also be translated to other applications such as artificial touch in robotics for surgery, rescue, and manufacturing.”
—– Image credit: Hillary Sanctuary / EPFL
Blue Origin founder opens up about company’s future commercial spaceflight plans
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
During a first-ever meeting with the media at his aerospace firm’s headquarters, secretive Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos revealed that he hopes to begin manned test flights in 2017, followed by actual space tourism flights the following year, various media outlets are reporting.
Amazon’s Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000 but never gave reporters access to the company’s headquarters in Washington. On Tuesday, he led 11 members of the media on a four-hour tour of his company’s operations, providing insight into their future plans along the way, according to the New York Times.
Next up for Blue Origin will be a third launch for their reusable New Shepard spacecraft, which in November traveled to the edge of space and made a return trip back in January. Provided that the next test fight goes well, he may begin taking space tourists in groups of six on short trips to experience microgravity in approximately two years time, he told the newspaper.
He and his engineers also showed off a new engine, the BE-4, which is under development, the Times said. A full version is scheduled to be completed and ready for testing by the end of 2016, he told reporters. The 12-foot-tall BE-4 is expected to produce 550,000 pounds of thrust and will be fueled by liquefied natural gas, Bezos had previously told reporters.
Blue Origin hopes to launch 100 flight per year; ticket cost TBD
Blue Origin has not yet started taking deposits, according to the Associated Press, meaning that there is no way to tell whether or not the venture will be a financial success. For his part, Bezos said that he is confident that his childhood dream will eventually be a profitable business.
The Amazon founder also declined to say how much money he had invested into Blue Origin, but the high-tech equipment and the approximately 600 employees required to keep things operational add up to “a very significant number.” He also said that safety was his firm’s primary concern, and that he hoped to eventually launch as many as 100 suborbital flights per year.
Bezos also promised that this would not be the last time that he met with reporters, and that that his reticence was not due to a desire to be secretive, but to avoid making promises or claims that his company could not live up to. “Space is really easy to overhype,” he told the Times. Even so, he promised to give more details about Blue Origin’s planned larger rocket later on this year, and said that the media would be invited to Texas to see a future New Shepard test flight.
He also told Reutersthat the company had not yet determined what it would charge passengers for their trip to the edge of space, but promised that it would be competitive with the prices that their rivals charge. Virgin Galactic, the news organization said, sells seats on its six-passenger SpaceShipTwo for $250,000, while XCOR Aerospace charges $100,000 for a person to fly with a pilot on their two-person Lynx space plane.
Why Getting Outside Is Important For Fibromyalgia Relief
Written By: Holly Case
Preston Hemmerich
Image: Olga Danylenko/Shutterstock
Most of us live in entirely climate controlled environments. The majority of Americans are lucky enough to have adequate shelter, with ways to heat and cool the indoors enough so that it’s always fairly comfortable. Particularly because most jobs are also done indoors, it’s completely possible to spend your days going from one indoor environment into another. But the world of nature is still out there waiting for you—and here’s why your health will benefit if you make it a priority to get outside.
Soak Up the Sun
Exposure to sunlight is an often overlooked essential part of good health, especially if you are a dedicated sunscreen user. A recent study showed that most Americans are deficient in vitamin D, which is most readily converted from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Vitamin D is thought to play a role in many illnesses that cause chronic pain, including fibromyalgia, and some studies suggest that vitamin D supplements could provide pain relief for fibromyalgia sufferers.
A Natural Mood Booster
Fibromyalgia is not all in your head, but there is still a well-documented link between stress, depression, and fibromyalgia symptoms. A recent study showed that a group nature walk had significant effects in improving mood and reducing symptoms of stress and depression. Simply having fibromyalgia can be stressful and depressing sometimes, so you may want to see if taking a nature walk can help.
Improve your Focus
Forgetfulness is a key symptom of fibromyalgia, leading to what some sufferers call the famous “fibro fog.” Poor memory and confusion are common in fibromyalgia. However, spending more time outside may have a positive effect on your concentration and mental state. Getting outside in nature gives your brain a break, especially from the negative effects of exposure to blue light from electronics such as computers and smartphones.
Get Some Exercise
Exercise is widely recommended for treating most health conditions, including fibromyalgia. However, going to the gym and walking on a treadmill can get boring after a while. Going for a walk or bike ride outdoors can be a lot more enjoyable, especially if you do so with a friend or loved one. As little as 20 to 30 minutes in the fresh air can help relieve muscle soreness and fatigue.
Breathe Better
We are surrounded by a variety of air pollutants, both indoors and out. However, the air indoors is continually re-circulated and concentration of chemicals is greater, making our potential exposure to pollutants much higher. Spending some time in fresh air can reduce your exposure to indoor air pollutants, some of which may cause headaches, asthma, and sleep problems.
Boost Your Immune System
Spending time in nature can boost your immune system and make it easier for your body to fight off viruses. According to a Japanese study, spending 6 hours in the woods over a two-day period increased the participants’ natural virus- and tumor-fighting white blood cells. While fibro sufferers might not spend this much time outdoors –unless while taking a camping trip—it’s possible that shorter periods of time spent in nature c
In one small step for man, scientists from Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands claim to have successfully grown the first crops using soils that simulate those found on Mars and the Moon.
In a University statement, the researchers revealed what they deemed to be surprising results—especially considering the first time they tried, the moon crops nearly entirely failed. This experiment was round two, which started in April of 2015.
Growing otherworldly crops
The researchers sowed 10 different crop species (tomato, rye, radish, pea, leek, spinach, garden rocket, cress, quinoa, and chives) in trays containing either Mars or Moon soil simulants or regular potting compost as a control representing Earth soil. The soil simulates were provided by NASA and represent the closest otherworldly equivalents found on earth: soil from a specific volcano in Hawaii for Mars, and soil from the desert in Arizona for the Moon.
The plants were grown in a glass house that was under constant temperature, humidity, and light conditions, as well as being under Earth atmosphere—an attempt to simulate future space conditions.
“This is because we expect that first crop growth on Mars and Moon will take place in underground rooms to protect the plants from the hostile environment including cosmic radiation,” said researcher Dr. Wieger Wamelink.
The team also incorporated some new methods into planting these crops, after learning the hard way from the first experiment.
“We used trays instead of small pots and added organic material (fresh cut grass) to the Mars and moon soil simulant,” explained Wamelink. “This solved the problem we had with watering in the first experiment and also added manure to the soils.”
And, in October of 2015, their toil bore fruit: Of the 10 crops, they were able to harvest tomatoes, peas, rye, garden rocket, radishes, and garden cress from both kinds of soils. Better yet, the amount produced was pretty stellar. Moon crop production naturally improved from the last experiment, and Mars production was slightly lower than the control Earth crops, but the difference was not statistically significant.
“That was a real surprise to us,” said Wamelink. “It shows that the Mars soil simulant has great potential when properly prepared and watered. The biomass growth on the moon soil simulant was less than on both other soils, about half of the biomass. Only the spinach showed poor biomass production.”
Caveat lector
Of course, it appears no paper has been published on this yet, meaning these results have not been vetted by the rest of the scientific community. Further, should everything pan out, this is only a proof-of-concept idea; growing plants on Mars will likely be much more complicated.
For example, when asked what would have to be added to Martian soil to allow plants to grow, Wamelink explained in a blog post:
“Martian soil is sterile, there is no life in it (as far as we know, it is still under investigation, but I will talk about it as if there is no life). What I need are bacteria for the mineralisation of organic matter and the binding of nitrogen (N) and transformation into nitrate (NO3). Then I need fungi that would help plants with the uptake of nutrients. They live in symbiosis with the plants and enlarge the root system of the plant.
“There is no organic matter in the Martian soil, thus that has to be added, which can be done by using the feces of the human Martians. These feces serve as manure, as does the urine. The urine can be applied straight away, the feces have to be sterilized first because of unwanted bacteria that are present inside the human body. (Looks like The Martian got that right.)
“Above ground I will need insects for the pollination of the flowers.”
And then there is another huge, potentially deadly hurdle yet to be overcome: toxic heavy metals in the crops.
“The soils contain heavy metals like lead, arsenic and mercury and also a lot of iron,” said Wamelink. “If the components become available for the plants, they may be taken up and find their way into the fruits, making them poisonous.
“Further research on this is necessary and that is one of the reasons why a crowdfunding campaign has been started to finance the third experiment that will be all about food safety. The experiment should start in April 2016 with the growth of a new batch of crops including potatoes and beans. If the crops prove to be safe enough to eat, the funders will be invited for dinner where a ‘Martian meal’ will be served that includes the harvested crops; at least for those who dare!”
Japanese bird species provides the first example of non-human syntax
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Syntax has long been a pillar of human language, but new research appearing in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communicationssuggests that the ability to combine different words and phrases to generate novel meanings may not be an ability uniquely possessed by humans.
In the study, an international team of researchers demonstrated that Japanese great tits follow a specific set of rules to combine their calls and communicate complex messages. The findings indicate that syntax itself may be a general adaptation to behavior or social complexity in a communications systems, the authors explained in a paper published Tuesday.
While previous research has shown that non-human primates and birds can develop the ability to combine meaningless vocalizations, the evolution of syntax, the ability to combine various words to form compound phrases or sentence was believed to have been unique to human language. But the new study suggests that the Japanese great tit has, in fact, developed syntax of its own.
As co-author David Wheatcroft, a postdoctoral researcher at the Uppsala University Department of Ecology and Genetics , explained in a statement, the research “demonstrates that syntax is not unique to human language, but also evolved independently in birds. Understanding why syntax has evolved in tits can give insights into its evolution in humans.”
Correct order essential for calls to prompt desired reaction
The Japanese great tit, a small bird species that faces numerous threats, responds to the presence of predators using a vast array of different calls, Wheatcroft and his colleagues said. Each of the calls can be used on its own, or in combination with other calls, and playback experiments show that the combinations of these calls each take on their own, distinct meaning.
Dr. Suzuki and colleagues could demonstrate that ABC calls signifies “scan for danger”, for example when encountering a perched predator, whereas D calls signify “come here”, for example when discovering a new food source, or to recruit the partner to their nest box. (Credit: Toshitaka Suzuki et al.)
For instance, they demonstrated that ABC calls warned other great tits to “scan for danger” when encountering a perched predator, while D calls instructed the birds to “come here,” which can be used when the bird discovered a new source of food or for other purposes. When combined as an ABC-D call, they are used when approaching or deterring potential predators.
However, the researchers found that they only worked when the calls were in the correct order – artificially reversing the call (D-ABC) prompted no response from the birds. Wheatcroft and his colleagues believe that the great tits use different call combinations to coordinate various social activities, and take advantage of syntax to trigger specific behavioral responses from other great tits.
Skywatchers in some parts of the world will be lucky enough to witness a total solar eclipse on March 8 and/or March 9, but even if you aren’t one of those can observe the phenomenon directly, experts note that you have plenty of other opportunities to view it.
As redOrbit reported last month, the moon will pass directly between the Earth and the Sun, and will block out the Sun for at least one minute along a nearly 100-mile-wide path that passes over Sumatra, then heads to Borneo and continues on to several islands in Southeastern Asia.
The eclipse will last between one and a half to four minutes at each stop along the way, and a total of three hours will pass from the time that the event is visible at its western-most point to the time it completes its 8,800 mile long journey east and comes to an end.
While Pacific Islanders will be able to see all the way down to the roots of the corona, officials from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a statement, some places, including Hawaii and Alaska, should be able to see a partial eclipse one hour before and after the total eclipse.
But what if you’re not in the path of the solar eclipse?
Solar eclipses typically occur just once per year due to the fact that the sun and moon orbit in slightly different planes, meaning that the opportunity to witness such events are limited. Those in the path of the eclipse are all set (so long as they make sure to take the proper precautions to protect their eyes), but what about the rest of us?
Fortunately, as National Geographic points out, those of us stuck in other parts of the world will be able to see the eclipse online shortly after the moon’s first dark shadows pass over Indonesia at 6pm Eastern Tuesday evening (Wednesday in Indonesia) and for the duration of the three hour event, which will vanish shortly after it makes its way to the Hawaiian islands.
The Slooh robotic telescope service will be live-streaming the total solar eclipse starting at 6pm EST on Tuesday, as astronomer Paul Cox and a team from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) will be broadcasting from Indonesia. The Washington Post explained that Slooh’s coverage will include two minutes of totality beginning at 7:37pm Eastern time.
In addition, the IAC announced late last week that their researchers would also be part of a sky-live.tv broadcast covering the event, and NASA also plans a livestream of the total solar eclipse, which ABC News said will take place between 8:38pm and 8:42pm Eastern time Tuesday night. If, perchance, you miss it, the next solar eclipse will be visible from Africa this September, with the next one passing over Europe and North America in August 2017.
‘Person on a chip’ tissue-growing method will revolutionize drug testing
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Testing new medications and finding organs for transplant all rely on one limited—and occasionally ethically wibbly-wobbly—resource: human beings. But researchers from the University of Toronto may have an exciting solution to this problem: A new “person-on-a-chip” technology known as the AngioChip.
This leap forward may just be the boost medicine needs, as current methods just aren’t enough.
“In the last few years, it has become possible to order cultures of human cells for testing, but they’re grown on a plate, a two-dimensional environment,” said Professor Milica Radisic of U of T Engineering in a statement. “They don’t capture all the functional hallmarks of a real heart muscle, for example.”
The difficulties in growing tissues
The AngioChip is one of several brand new methods scientists have recently discovered to grow human tissue in labs—but with important differences that separate it from the rest. The team has created tiny, biodegradable scaffolds which cells grow on, producing organ tissue closer to the real thing than the normal tissue found in a petri dish.
“It’s a fully three-dimensional structure complete with internal blood vessels,” said Radisic. “It behaves just like vasculature, and there’s a lattice for other cells to attach and grow.”
According to the paper in Nature Materials, the AngioChip scaffold is constructed from a polymer known as POMaC, which is created in a series of thin layers with special channels boring through them. When the layers are stacked and melded together using UV light, these channels create the 3D structure of a synthetic blood vessel.
After the chip is completed, it is then bathed in a liquid filled with living cells. These cells attach to the inside and outside of the “blood vessels,” and then commence growing just like they would in the human body.
“Previously, people could only do this using devices that squish the cells between sheets of silicone and glass,” said Radisic. “You needed several pumps and vacuum lines to run just one chip. Our system runs in a normal cell culture dish, and there are no pumps; we use pressure heads to perfuse media through the vasculature. The wells are open, so you can easily access the tissue.”
Successes already shown
After going through the whole process using specific kinds of cells, the team actually managed to produce heart and liver tissues that function like they do in the human body. For example, when white blood cells were injected into a manufactured vessel, the cells squeezed through the vessel wall to reach the tissue on the other side—just like what happens naturally.
“Our liver actually produced urea and metabolized drugs,” added Radisic.
Not only did the tissues behave like, well, the real thing, but their technique can also connect tissues of different organs together—meaning the body as a whole system could be created, and could show how different parts of the body react together when exposed to a new medicine.
This could mean that, in theory, we could test drugs on tissue systems created by the AngioChip scaffold—skipping over animal and human testing entirely. Naturally, this would save time and money—and, therefore, lives.
But more than that, these lab-grown tissues could be used for those waiting for organ transplants. Currently, those who receive a transplant spend the rest of their lives taken medications to ensure their body does not reject the foreign tissue now nestled within—but AngioChip organs would be grown will cells right from the host, meaning the chance of organ rejection would plummet.
In fact, the team has already done a few proof-of-concept tests of this idea: They implanted AngioChip tissue into living animals. The artificial blood vessels actually connected with the real ones, and the polymer scaffold simply degraded given a few months.
All this being said, the potential for AngioChip tissues are quite obviously enormous.
“It really is multifunctional, and solves many problems in the tissue engineering space,” said Radisic. “It’s truly next-generation.”
The IXS Enterprise is NASA’s blend of real ‘warp drive’ technology and Star-Trek science-fiction
Written By: Brett Smith
Brian Galloway
While they differ significantly, both Star Trek and Star Wars rely on “warp speed” technology to move characters around their respective fictional galaxies.
According to a recent report from NASA’s 100 Year Spaceship Program, warp speed could become a reality, and a NASA engineer and his collaborator has recently unveiled CGI plans for a ship that could travel at warp speed.
Dubbed the IXS Enterprise, the ship looks a lot like its namesake, the USS Enterprise from Star Trek.
Credit: Mark Rademaker/Flickr
“We wanted to have a decent image of a theory conforming Warp ship to motivate young people to pursue a STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) career,” ship designer Mark Rademakertold The Washington Post. “It does have some Sci-Fi features that might never transfer to a possible final design, unless we really want to.”
Credit: Mark Rademaker/Flickr
Using “warp drive” technology
Capable of interstellar travel over the course of weeks and months, the proposed technology would create a “warp bubble” around a ship by expanding space-time behind the ship and contracting space-time in front of it. While the ship wouldn’t move by traditional propulsion, the passengers inside would perceive movement.
“Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed,” NASA physicist Harold Whitetold io9. “However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy.”
How much is “a lot of energy”? Well, White’s initial concept called for an amount of energy equal to the mass of the planet Jupiter.
“However,” White said, “based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope.”
After performing some recalculations of his original work, White concluded his warp drive could be powered by for an amount of energy equal to the mass of NASA’s Voyager probe. These new calculations mean a warp drive is plausible. A proof-of-concept study is the next step to showing a warp drive is possible.
“Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice,” White said.
Credit: Mark Rademaker/Flickr
Credit: Mark Rademaker/Flickr
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Visit Mark Rademaker’s redbubblepage to see more of the IXS Enterprise and purchase merchandise featuring the design.
The Patient as CEO: How can collaboration improve healthcare?
Written By: John Hopton
Brian Galloway
Doctors deserve respect and admiration, but does the god-like status we give them mean we end up letting them making vital decisions about our lives without challenging them to make sure those decisions are correct? Robin Farmanfarmaian certainly thinks so.
And she should know. After being misdiagnosed with an autoimmune disease at the age of 16, the author of The Patient as CEO: How Technology Empowers the Healthcare Consumerhad 3 organs removed and was hospitalized 26 times during ten years of hell, after which she fired all her doctors and replaced them with “a team of doctors who would work with me collaboratively, as a peer and a colleague.”
She built a team across different hospital systems, removing the “victim-god” relationship.
“Instead of going into a doctor’s appointment feeling victimized by my own body, by my disease, by the healthcare system and by codes we don’t understand, I decided to be the one in control – the CEO,” Robin told RedOrbit.
“I decided this is no longer an authority situation; I’m going to start looking at this person as a colleague who is going to make me better,” she added. “Every time I had an MRI or a CAT scan or a blood test I got hard copies, so they could start to build a profile.”
Robin says that while she met resistance from some doctors, others were willing to try things her way. She advises that anyone who finds a doctor unprepared to listen to a patient on their own body should “walk away.”
Some doctors may be unwilling to change, but Robin believes that technology will make it increasingly easy for patients to be their own health “CEO”, and to understand their own bodies and conditions better than a doctor who thinks about them only during a short 15-minute window.
“Artificial intelligence, robotics, 3-D printing, point-of-care diagnostics – these things working together give you access to an unprecedented amount of information and a dashboard on the human body,” she explained.
“In the next 5 or 10 years we’re going to see things like sensors inside of blood vessels under the skull giving you instant data; an instant report card.”
Healthcare your way
We could live in a world where we barely ever have to even go into a hospital, Robin believes.
“If you want to be in the middle of Africa getting robotic surgery by a surgeon who happens to be in France, if you want sensors that are subcutaneous, you could have it. Healthcare when you want it, how you want it,” she suggests.
Robin is currently involved in pioneering technology that will be able to diagnose sleep apnea in the home, and is on the board of directors at a non-profit called the Organ Preservation Alliance, which aims to “build on recent advances in cryopreservation, ice-blockers and vitrification…to catalyze breakthroughs on the remaining obstacles towards the long-term storage of organs.”
Can doctors get used to all this new technology at the same time as getting used to patients being treated as equals?
A change in education will be required, as doctors “need to become medical engineers, data literate, genome literate, device enabled,” says Robin. But she does find “a lot of physicians are very open to this new paradigm shift.”
Change may not come easy, but when you really think about it, Robin concludes, “how do you say to someone: ‘you don’t have control over your own body and your own life – I’m the one in charge of how you feel’?”
New images show Pluto’s snowcapped mountains are home to methane ice
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
Cthulhu Regio, an 1,850 mile (3,000 km) stretch along Pluto’s equator that is one of the most recognizable features on the dwarf planet, is home to a mountain range which appears to be coated in methane ice, NASA officials revealed in a statement released late last week.
Roughly 450 miles (750 km) wide and slightly larger than the state of Alaska, Cthulhu begins to the west of the massive nitrogen ice plains known as Sputnik Planum, the US space agency said. It is characterized by a dark surface, which scientists believe is because the area is covered by a layer of tholins – molecules that form when methane is exposed to sunlight.
Geologically speaking, the region is home to several different types of terrain, and a new reddish enhanced color image released by NASA, there is a 260 miles (420 km) long mountain range in the southeastern part of Cthulhu. That mountain range contains peaks blanketed with a bright substance that contrasts sharply with the dark red hue of its surroundings, and scientists believe that coating is methane ice.
“That this material coats only the upper slopes of the peaks suggests methane ice may act like water in Earth’s atmosphere, condensing as frost at high altitude,” New Horizons science team member John Stansberry of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, said on Thursday.
Find comes just days after the discovery of polar canyons
According to Stansberry and his colleagues, compositional data collected by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) instrument (which can been seen in the right inset of the new image) indicates that the bright ice on the mountain peaks is located in almost the exact same locations as methane ice (depicted in false color as purple).
This enhanced color image was captured in a resolution of nearly 2,230 feet (680 meters) per pixel, and measures roughly 280 miles (450 km) long by 140 miles (225 km) wide, said NASA. It was taken approximately 45 minutes before New Horizon’s closest approach to Pluto, when it was about 21,100 miles (33,900 km) away from the surface of the dwarf planet on July 14, 2015.
The newest image comes less than two weeks after the release of one that led to the discovery of wide frozen canyons in Pluto’s north polar region – specifically, long canyons running vertically along the area of the dwarf planet informally called Lowell Regio, the largest of which was some 45 miles (75 km) and which is located close to the dwarf planet’s north pole, the agency said.
Two other canyons, running roughly parallel along either side of the widest one, were about six miles (10 kilometers) wide and contained degraded walls that seem to indicate that they were much older than those found elsewhere on Pluto’s surface. The canyons also contained what appeared to be evidence that the dwarf planet had once been home to significant tectonic activity.
Radioactive element was present during solar system’s formation, team finds
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
In a discovery that will end a more than three decade-long debate, a team of scientists from the University of Chicago discovered evidence in a meteorite indicating that the rare element curium was present during the formation of the solar system.
For 35 years, researchers have debated whether or not curium, an element first discovered by a team of Berkeley researchers in 1944, played a role in stellar evolution and the synthesis of elements in stars, UChicago alum François Tissot, currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, and his colleagues reported in the March 4 edition of Science Advances.
Credit: University of Chicago
While studying a carbonaceous meteorite, Tissot’s team found evidence of the element in an unusual ceramic inclusion they called “Curious Marie,” which like curium itself, was named in honor of Marie Curie, one of the pioneers of radioactivity. Not only did they find evidence that the element existed in the early solar system, they were able to determine how much of it there was in relation to plutonium-244 and other heavy radioactive elements.
Each of these radioactive isotopes, they explained, could have been produced at the same time by a single process in stars, and the curium could have become part of the process after it condensed from the same gas cloud from which the sun formed during the early days of the solar system.
The ‘smoking gun’ for curium’s existence in the early solar system
The Allende carbonaceous meteorite was analyzed and found to contain traces of the rare element. Credit: François L.H. TissotClose
As Tissot explained in a statement, “Curium is an elusive element. It is one of the heaviest-known elements, yet it does not occur naturally because all of its isotopes are radioactive and decay rapidly on a geological time scale.” For 35 years, scientists debated whether or not the element would have been present when the solar system originally formed.
When curium was first discovered, it was because the UC Berkeley scientists bombarded atoms of plutonium with alpha particles (atoms of helium), and studied the new radioactive element as it decayed so that they could chemically identify it. What they had synthesized turned out to be a highly unstable isotope, curium-242, that had a half-life of just 162 days.
Curium can only exist on Earth when manufactured in laboratories, or when created as the result of a nuclear explosion, the study authors explained. However, scientists hypothesized that it may have been produced by massive stellar explosions predating the solar system. Curium-247, which is the longest-lived isotope of the element, eventually decays into uranium, they noted, meaning that minerals rich in uranium may have at one time contained curium-247.
“The idea is simple enough, yet, for nearly 35 years, scientists have argued about the presence of 247Cm in the early solar system,” said Tissot. Previous studies were divided on the topic until, in 2010, a new, high-performance mass spectrometer enabled scientists to detect the telltale isotope of uranium that could have resulted from the decomposition of curium-247. It was, as university officials put it, the “smoking gun” for the existence of curium in the early solar system.
Discovery could explain how gold, other elements came to be
Tissot called that research “an important step forward,” but added that the amounts were so small that they could have been the result of other processes. So as part of their research, his team set out to find a mineral or inclusion that likely incorporated a significant amount of curium, but that contained a comparatively low amount of uranium, which could have occurred naturally.
They identified a type of meteoritic inclusion that was abundant in calcium and aluminum, better known as calcium aluminum-rich inclusions of CAIs. CAIs, they explained, have low amounts of uranium and an abundant amount of curium. One such inclusion, Curious Marie, contained very little uranium, and using this sample, Tissot said that he and his colleagues were able to “resolve an unprecedented excess of 235U.”
“All natural samples have a similar isotopic composition of uranium,” he said, “but the uranium in Curious Marie has six percent more 235U, a finding that can only be explained by live 247Cm in the early solar system.” Using this sample, the study authors were able to calculate the amount of curium present in the early solar system, and found that it was likely produced alongside other radioactive elements as part of a single process that took place in stars.
“This is particularly important because it indicates that as successive generations of stars die and eject the elements they produced into the galaxy, the heaviest elements are produced together, while previous work had suggested that this was not the case,” said co-author Nicolas Dauphas, also from the University of Chicago. Their work means that curium can now be added to models of stellar nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution, which should help explain how elements such as gold were originally produced.
Living with any type of chronic illness is not only difficult to experience, it’s also difficult to discuss with others. Showing weakness of any sort is not always acceptable in American society, and telling the wrong person about your illness could change how they treat you. Here are some thoughts to consider about when and how you should talk to people about your fibromyalgia.
Need-to-Know Basis
Telling people that you have fibromyalgia is often better when done on a need-to-know basis. People you live with, such as your significant other or your children, are more likely to see your symptoms for themselves and to be affected by them. Obviously, the healthcare providers who treat you should also be considered among the group that needs to know, particularly if your health affects how they may treat you. For example, your family physician, specialists such as rheumatologists, and even therapists should know about your fibromyalgia because your health conditions may be relevant to how they care for you. However, it may not be as necessary to tell your dentist, since teeth are not often affected by fibromyalgia.
Should You Tell your Boss?
If you are still working, the decision about whether or not to tell your boss about fibromyalgia can be difficult. It is hard to work during a fibro flare and not have it affect your performance, so it may help your boss to know that you have medical reasons affecting your job function. Telling your boss may also be necessary, along with your doctors, if you intend to leave your job and collect disability payments. To collect disability, you would likely need additional documentation from your employer showing that you are not able to meet the normal demands of your job.
Bias against Fibromyalgia
Most fibromyalgia sufferers already know that some people have a negative bias against fibromyalgia as an illness and feel the same toward those who have it. Some people even disbelieve that fibromyalgia is a valid illness. For this reason, it is unfortunately a good idea to use caution in deciding whom you tell about your illness. You may not only fail to get sympathy from them but could lead them to think less of your abilities.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
The key to telling people about your fibromyalgia depends on knowing whom you can really trust with the details. Some people are close confidantes that you can trust with telling them if you’re having a bad day or are experiencing a lot of pain. Support groups, many of which are online, are also good places to go for sympathy and advice, especially because the other participants have first-hand experience with dealing with similar challenges.
It is unfortunate but true that you may want to limit the amount of details about your physical symptoms that you share with casual acquaintances, coworkers, and people that you don’t know well. Many people are caring and do want to know how you’re feeling, and it’s more than okay to tell them when you’re not doing well. However, you may want to save more details about your symptoms for sympathetic ears.
The Mariana Trench is incredibly noisy, says NOAA researchers
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
If a screaming infant on an airplane, road rage-filled motorist with an unusual love for their car horn, or annoying neighbors who refuse to turn down the bass have ever driven you to dream about the quietest place on Earth, we have some relevant news for you: It’s not the bottom of the ocean.
In July of 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in conjunction with Oregon State University and the U.S. Coast Guard, spent three weeks continuously monitoring ambient noise from the bottom of the Mariana Trench—the deepest point in the ocean which, at a depth of 7 miles, could hold all of Mount Everest with 7,166 feet (2,183 meters) to spare.
The intent of the project was to establish a baseline for ambient noise in the area, as scientists are uncertain how the increasing volume of human-created noise—which has risen steadily in recent decades—might affect marine animals that use sound to communicate, navigate, and feed, like whales, dolphins, and certain fish.
Recording at the bottom of the sea
Of course, getting recordings at 36,000 feet under the sea was no mean feat.
The hydrophone used to capture the sound. (Credit: NOAA)
“The pressure at that depth is incredible,” said Haru Matsumoto, an Oregon State ocean engineer who aided in the research, in a statement. “We had to drop the hydrophone mooring down through the water column at no more than five meters per second to be sure the hydrophone, which is
made of ceramic, would survive the rapid pressure change.”
In fact, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is more than 16,000 pounds per square inch (PSI)—the average home or office is less than 15.
After the hydrophone was deployed from the Guam-based U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Sequoia in July, ships’ schedules and typhoons prevented the researchers from recovering the flash drive with all its data. However, it remained anchored to the ocean floor until they were finally able to return in November.
The results were pretty surprising.
“You would think that the deepest part of the ocean would be one of the quietest places on Earth,” said Robert Dziak, a NOAA research oceanographer and chief project scientist. “Yet there is almost constant noise. The ambient sound field is dominated by the sound of earthquakes, both near and far, as well as distinct moans of baleen whales, and the clamor of a category 4 typhoon that just happened to pass overhead.”
Early peanut exposure lowers allergy chance later in life, study finds
Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway
Peanut allergies are a tough nut to crack, but a new study out of the New England Journal of Medicine offers fresh hope for prevention by demonstrating that exposing infants to peanuts may actually protect against later allergies.
“Food allergies are a growing concern, not just in the United States but around the world,” said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “For a study to show a benefit of this magnitude in the prevention of peanut allergy is without precedent. The results have the potential to transform how we approach food allergy prevention.”
Food allergies have become more prevalent across the years—some of the people who eat gluten-free actually need to, after all—and peanut allergies are no exception. In the last decade alone, the occurrence of peanut allergy across North America and the UK has doubled. Now, between 1-3 percent of all children across the USA, Western Europe, and Australia have peanut allergies—and very few of them will outgrow it. It develops early in life, and there is no cure—meaning that prevention of the allergy in the first place may just be the solution we need.
Early exposure can work
Researchers led by Dr. Gideon Lack from Kings College London had previously discovered that peanut exposure could be the answer. In the first large, well-controlled study of this kind, 640 infants aged 4-11 months, all of whom were considered high-risk for developing peanut allergy (as they already had exhibited severe eczema and/or an egg allergy), were either regularly exposed to peanuts 3 or more times per week or avoided them entirely until age 5. The researchers verified avoidance or consumption both by a questionnaire and by measuring the levels of peanut dust near the children’s beds.
Children who were exposed to peanuts were more than 80 percent less likely to develop an allergy than children who avoided peanuts.
The results were obviously extremely important, but there was no indication of whether the effects would last in the long-term, especially if all participants stopped eating peanuts.
Following up with more questions
And so, the researchers decided to extend the original study, which was known as LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy), following 556 of the children (274 previous peanut consumers, 282 abstainers) from this research in the study now titled LEAP-ON. Now, all were asked to avoid peanuts for a year. And, as before, peanut dust samples and surveys confirmed compliance with instructions.
12 months later, an oral food challenge was given to each participant to test their allergy status. And, as it turned out, only 4.8 percent of the original peanut consumers were allergic, while 18.6 percent of the abstainers were—still a 74 percent relative difference between the two groups.
“The LEAP-ON findings exceeded our expectations and demonstrated that the early consumption of peanuts provided stable and sustained protection against the development of peanut allergy in children at greatest risk for this allergy,” said Dr. Lack in a statement. “This protective effect occurred irrespective of whether the children completely avoided peanut for one year or continued to eat it sporadically.”
Or in a nutshell: Periodic lapses in peanut consumption won’t likely lead to the development of the allergy, at least not for the span of a year. The researchers are planning a longer-term study with the participants, though, to fortify this data.
“This study offers reassurance that eating peanut-containing foods as part of a normal diet—with occasional periods of time without peanut—will be a safe practice for most children following successful tolerance therapy,” said Dr. Gerald Nepom, director of the Immune Tolerance Network. “The immune system appears to remember and sustain its tolerant state, even without continuous regular exposure to peanuts.”
“We believe this new information will inform the public health debate on infant guidelines and shed light on the mechanisms that underpin the induction of oral tolerance,” added Dr. Lack.
However, this does not mean you should start feeding your infant peanuts right away if you don’t already.
“The study also excluded infants showing early strong signs of having already developed peanut allergy; the safety and effectiveness of early peanut consumption in this group remains unknown and requires further study. Parents of infants and young children with eczema and/or egg allergy should consult with an Allergist, Pediatrician, or their General Practitioner prior to feeding them peanut products,” Lack emphasized.
Falcon 9 launch successful, but at-sea landing fails again
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
After multiple delays, SpaceX was finally able to successfully launch its Falcon 9 rocket for the fifth time on Friday, but once again the Elon Musk-owned firm was unable to land the booster on an offshore platform in the Atlantic Ocean, according to BBC News and USA Today.
Friday’s launch followed a series of five delays over the past couple of weeks, including setbacks due to technical and weather-related problems. The launch placed a telecommunications satellite in orbit for Luxembourg-based SES. 6:35pm Eastern time on Friday night.
At 12,000 pounds, the satellite is the largest payload carried into orbit by the Falcon 9, according to published reports. It was delivered to a target altitude of 25,228 miles (40,600 kilometers), and will deliver HD television and broadband internet to the Asia-Pacific region, said USA Today.
It was SpaceX’s first mission for SES and the first of three launched planned for the company in 2016, provided they are able to reduce more frequently and cut back on the number of delays, the newspaper added. It is also their third successful launch following a failed one last summer, and the second liftoff for the recently-upgraded Falcon 9 rocket.
Next SpaceX launch set for April, as Dragon capsule makes its return
However, the news wasn’t all good for Musk and his aerospace company, as the Washington Post explained they were once again unsuccessful at landing the reusable rocket on a floating platform off the coast of Cape Canaveral called an “autonomous space port droneship.”
Reports indicate that the landing attempt, which took place about 10 minutes after the launch, failed when the rocket landed too hard on the droneship. SpaceX said before liftoff that the odds of success on this landing attempt were low, but Musk later tweeted that he felt that there was “a good chance” they would stick the landing next time.
While the company successfully landed a Falcon 9 on land last December as part of its efforts to recover and reuse the boosters, thus reducing the cost of spaceflight, they have yet to manage the feat on the floating platform, said USA Today. The company’s next launch is scheduled for April, and will be the first time they have attempted to use their Dragon cargo capsule to send supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) since last June’s failed launch.
Later on this year, SpaceX plans to use its Falcon rockets to place the next-generation Iridium sat-phone constellation into orbit, carrying the probes into space 10 at a time, according to BBC News. The Falcon-Heavy rocket, which is made up of three first-stage boosters, is also expected to make its debut before the end of the year, and the Dragon is expected to carry astronauts to the ISS for the first time in early 2017, the British media outlet added.
99-million year old lizards trapped in amber give us a glimpse into a ‘lost world’
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
These tiny ancient lizards found well-preserved in amber provide a glance at what life would have been like nearly 100 million years ago, researchers from the American Museum of Natural Historyand Sam Houston State University explained in a newly-published study.
Writing in the latest edition of the journal Science Advances, lead author and SHSU professor Juan Diego Daza and his colleagues revealed that they discovered 12 of the pint-sized reptiles entombed in amber within a private collection of stones donated to the American Museum of Natural History by their previous owner.
According to Smithsonian.com, the lizards were caught in the resin of ancient coniferous trees some 99 million years ago, where they have remained until present day. Originally discovered several decades ago in the mines of Burma, many of the creatures remain in exceptional shape, the study authors noted, with their claws, bones, scales and toe pads all still intact.
Credit: Daza et. al./Science Advances
“The fossilized amber provides a view into a lost world, revealing that the tropics of the Mid-Cretaceous contained a diverse lizard fauna,” co-author Dr Edward Stanley, a researcher at the museum, told BBC News. He and his fellow researchers added that they plan to use CT scan to “digitally dissect” the lizards without damaging the amber.
Chameleon ‘missing link’ among the reptiles discovered
Two of the fossils are relatives of modern-day geckos and chameleons, the British news outlet said, and will help provide insight into what the Daza and Stanley are calling a “lost world” by revealing how reptilian features such as adhesive toe-pads originally evolved.
Credit: Daza et. al.
Others died out completely and have no modern-day equivalent, they added, and one lizard is what appears to be a transitional form between a “traditional” lizard and a chameleon, Stanley told BBC News. This so-called “missing link” is “roughly 80 million years older than the next oldest chameleon fossil,” he added, and shows that the chameleon’s projectile tongue evolved early on in its history – before it evolved fused toes to climb on branches.
Likewise, Smithsonian.com noted that the researchers also found a gecko predecessor that had modern-style toe pads and were said to be a “good representation” of the kind of reptiles which exist today. Chameleons, who are closely related to a group known as the agamidae, have long been believed to have split from this group around the mid-Cretaceous period. These newfound specimens mark the first time fossil evidence to support that hypothesis has been discovered.
“These fossils represent most of the diversity of lizards with a superb amount of detail,” Daza told BBC News. “We can pretty much see how the animals looked when they were alive. They provide a really nice snapshot of the past. To me it is like going back in time and doing a lizard collecting trip when we can see what these animals looked like.”
Fhe Okeanos Explorer craft was exploring the waters off northeastern of Necker Island (Mokumanamana) in the Hawaiian Archipelago on February 27 as part of a deep dive to help determine whether or not there was a connection between the island and Necker Ridge, a narrow feature which extends more than 400 miles and protrudes beyond the current US exclusive economic zone.
In addition, its remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Deep Discoverer had been surveying biological communities at depths of nearly 4,300 meters, when it located the mysterious octopod resting on a flat rock lightly covered in sediment, the NOAA said. Its appearance was unlike any previously known cephalopod, and its discovery was the deepest that such a creature had ever been seen.
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The ghost-like octopod was found 14,074 feet (4,290 meters) below sea level, and was identified as a member of the incirrate suborder, which lack fins on the sides of their bodies and also do not have fingerlike cirri associated with the suckers on their arms, the agency noted. These octopods are similar in appearance to the common, shallow-water octopus.
‘Almost certainly’ a new octopod species, researchers claim
The newfound octopod’s unusual appearance is due to its lack of pigment cells, also known as chromatophores, and its lack of muscularity, the researchers said. While members of the cirrate suborder have been spotted at depths of more than 5,000 meters, this marks the first time that an incirrate cephalopod had observed at depths of more than 4,000 meters, they added.
The creature, which possesses just one series of suckers on each arm instead of two, has gotten a lot of attention in the few days since its discovery, largely due to its appearance. The NOAA said that some social media users have even joked about naming it after Casper, the friendly ghost of comic and cartoon fame, and some reporters have asked if they could keep it as a pet.
“It is almost certainly an undescribed species and may not belong to any described genus,” wrote Michael Vecchione of the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service. He added that the agency is considering combining their findings with other unusually deep incirrate observations by a cruise ship in the eastern Pacific in a paper that would be submitted to scientific journals.
New breakthrough could help the immune system fight cancer
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway
An international team of researchers believe may have discovered a breakthrough in cancer treatment, as they believe they have found a way to direct a patient’s immune system to attack specific biological markers within a tumor cell in order to combat the disease.
The study, which was funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, follows research into the lung and skin cancer cells that found that tumor cells possess a set of genetic flags which could be targeted by the body’s built-in defense system.
According to BBC News, previous attempts to create vaccines that direct the immune system to target cancer cells have largely failed because those cells are not uniform in nature. Rather, they are heavily mutated, genetically varied, and behave drastically different from one another.
However, even as those cells grow and mutate, there are surface proteins, also known as antigens, that the authors of this new study believe could be potential targets for new therapies that harness the power of the immune system to fight the disease, The Guardian added.
While treatments that use the body’s own defenses have proven effective in some cancers, such as melanoma, other forms of the disease are able to avoid being labeled as potentially harmful to the body. However, lead researcher Charles Swanton from the Francis Crick Institute in London is convinced that antigens could be the “Achilles’ heel” of tumor cells. Researchers hope to begin human trials by 2018 or 2019
As Swanton explained to The Guardian, he and a team of colleagues from Harvard University, University College London and elsewhere “found for the first time… that tumors essentially sow the seeds of their own destruction, and that within tumors, there are immune cells that recognize those flags which are present in every tumor cell.”
By analyzing cancer patients as part of their study, the researchers found that those immune cells did attack the cancer cells, but that they weren’t strong enough to destroy the tumors. They found that some of the immune cells did recognize these genetic flags in the cancer cells, but wound up being outnumbered by the malignant cells or wiped out by the tumor’s defenses.
Armed with this knowledge, Swanton’s team sees two possible methods that could be used to treat cancer patients. In one case, doctors could take and analyze a biopsy to find the flags that are present on each of the malignant cells, then multiply the immune cells that recognize those flags and infuse them into the patient. In the other, the actual flags themselves could be used to develop a new vaccine to treat that specific form of cancer.
As BBC News pointed out, the treatment method would likely be very expensive and has yet to be tested – although Swanton said that he hopes to conduct the first human trials in lung cancer patients within the next two to three years. Other experts caution that while the treatment sounds simple enough, it will likely be more complicated than first impressions would suggest.
“Targeting trunk mutations makes sense from many points of view, but it is early… and whether it’s that simple, I’m not entirely sure,” Dr. Marco Gerlinger from the Institute of Cancer Research told the British media outlet. Many cancers evolve constantly, he added, and could “change and evolve” to “lose the initial antigen” or develop new ones to confound the immune system.
—– Image credit: Cancer Research UK
The galaxy is question is named GN-z11, and an international team of astronomers were able to use the venerable space telescope to measure the galaxy, which existed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, the European Space Agency explained in a statement.
The research, which is detailed in research now available onlineand set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, marks the first time that an the distance of an object so far from Earth has been reliably measured, and it may provide new insight into the earliest galaxies ever formed.
Detail of the galaxy. Credit: NASA/Hubble/ESA
Previously, astronomers had estimated the distance of GN-z11 by analyzing its color in images obtained by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope, and they believed they would not be able to actually measure its distance until the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched.
Researchers close to finding the first generation of galaxies
However, using the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, they were able to precisely and spectroscopically measure the distance to the galaxy by splitting the light it emitted into each of its component colors and measuring the redshift of the object, the astronomers explained.
Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
“Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even further away than we had originally thought,” said second author Gabriel Brammer from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Their analysis places GN-z11 “right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe,” he added.
The previous record-holder, EGSY8p7, had a redshift of 8.68. GN-z11 was discovered to have a redshift of 11.1, which the researchers report corresponds to 400 million years following the Big Bang. As the galaxy was unexpectedly bright, its distance measurements suggest that previously discovered, unusually bright galaxies may also be further away than expected.
“The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas,” co-author Rychard Bouwens of the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, explained. “GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe.”
“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form,” added Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This new discovery shows that JWST will surely find many such young galaxies reaching back to when the first galaxies were forming.”
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Image credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
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had 3 organs removed and was hospitalized 26 times during ten years of hell, after which she fired all her doctors and replaced them with “a team of doctors who would work with me collaboratively, as a peer and a colleague.”
